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When a desert man drifts into a strange town 
he takes no letters of introduction and there's 
no one to vouch for him. Over his after-dinner 
cigareet in the Mesa Hotel office, he drops a 
casual remark as to the trail by which he entered 
town and the name of the last town he left, and 
the ice begins to melt. Mutual friends are dis- 
covered, reminiscences follow, and he is identi- 
fied. 

Howdy, Stranger! I come from the town 
o' Golden Spur, on the edge of that Desert over 
yonder. 



c* 



THE LAND 
WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

SKETCHES OF THE AMERICAN DESERT 



BY 
ORVILLE H. LEONARD 




BOSTON 

SHERMAN, FRENCH & COMPANY 

1917 






copybight, 1917 
Shermak, French 6* Company 

Am -4 1918 



©CLA479840 



1 



TO THE WILL-O'-THE-WISP OF THE DESERT 

AND 

TO THOSE WHO FOLLOW HIS LIGHT 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

DO YOU REMEMBER 3 

OVER THE CIGAREETS 

The Greaser 9 

A Deal in Leather 14< 

Reversion 18 

A Nevada Idyl 24 

Bootleg 28 

Reconciliation 31 

His Best Beloved Son 37 

A Skinner's Day 44! 

Aspiration 51 

The Skinner 53 

ON AND OFF THE TRAIL 

Civilization 57 

Dawn 60 

Compensation 62 

A Desert Garden 64 

Survival of the Unfit 68 

Ignorance 71 

Patience 74 

Through a Window 76 

Variety 77 

FRIENDS OF MINE 

The Forty-Niness 81 

A ^Missouri Meerschaum 85 

PiNON 88 

For Sheriff 92 

That Country Over There .... 101 

The Miner 105 



? 



PAGE 

Gopher Holes 108 

Lost Opportunity , .112 

Prospectin' . . . 114 

DRY COLORS 

Al Desierto 119 

A Desert Day 121 

A Desert Night 124 

Thirst 126 

The Paint-box 128 

Hangman's Tree 129 

TALKING WATER AND WHISPERING 
WIND 

Running Water 135 

The Reckless Desert Wind .... 137 

A Message 138 

The Wooing Wind 140 

The Wind in the Sage 142 

What the Wind Whispered . . . .145 

DESERT SPECIMENS 

I'm Going to That Country Over There 149 
The Bark of the Coyote . . . . .152 
Desert Children 154 

GOBS AND HOBGOBS 

The Indian and the Princess .... 159 

Mountain Music 163 

Nimrod 165 

Desert Witchcraft 168 

Will-o'-the-Wisp 170 



! 



PINE AND CHAPARRAL 

PAGE 

Growing Pains 175 

Pines 176 

A Magic Plume 178 

A Silver Sunset 180 

Heat 183 

Gold 185 

Night 189 

A Sanitarium 191 

Sunshine Hill 193 

WHERE THE GULCHES RUN WITH RAIN 

Drought 197 

A Miner's Lament 199 

Circumstantial Evidence 200 

A TOAST 203 



SALUTATIONS 



PREFACE 

Stranger, I ain't no naturalist 

An' I ain't no poet, either. 

But, by the great horned toad o' the desert, 

I ain't no liar, neither. 



O' course, I follered the Will-o'-the-Wisp, 
An' I heered the fairies sing. 
Didn't I see the Injun shoot. 
An' his hawk with a broken wing.? 

In the mountains I've seen the dawnin' 
An' felt somethin' inside me swell, 
Jist like flowers a-bloomin' 
Deep down in my ole think-well. 

So I reckon that the desert 

Is both Hell an' Paradise. 

It all depends on the way you look. 

An' the focus o' your eyes. 

There's a whole lot more o' beauty 
In the world than we mostly git, 
Because we're jist plain worryin' 
Or tryin' to raise our bet. 



So when the world looks blackest 
Jist ride by yourself a spell, 
An', p'rhaps, if you hunt fer beauty 
'Twon't seem quite so much like Hell. 

But, Stranger, we'll quit moralizin'. 

Here's my final yell. 
I couldn't a-done this book alone. 
So I told these yarns to Elisabeth Bowen- 

Say, ain't she done it well ! 



A HIGH SIGN TO THE READER AT THE 
CROSSING OF THE TRAILS 



Howdy! I've just pulled my freight from 
the Desert and I'm hitting the trail for That 
Country Over There. 

News of the Desert? Some. 

Already I am missing it — I did not realize 
how much of desert air I had inhaled till after I 
had left it. Here is some of it expelled in 
short, quick gasps. 

Stranger, you'd be surprised at some of the 
things that go on in the Desert, for there's a 
bunch of shacks here and there on its edge where 
there's comedy and tragedy, thrift and laziness, 
just as there is anywhere else. And the Will- 
o'-the-Wisp is there. Many I've seen pursuing 
him eagerly, determinedly. Besides, I've fol- 
lowed him myself. And in the desert moun- 
tains the Indian fairies live — I can hear them 
singing even now. Nonsense? Look here. 
Stranger, once when I told a grave and matter- 
of-fact engineer that I had heard the fairies 
singing in the mountains, he nodded understand- 
ingly and said he had heard them, also. There 
are too few fairies nowadays — they have 



mostly been killed off or run out into the wild 
spots, where you have to go to find them. It's 
always the open season on fairies. 

There's one thing the Desert does for a man 
— it makes him feel so infernally small, except 
when he's lit up, and then he feels bigger there 
than anywhere else, for he has more room to 
ramp round in. He feels small because he has 
a great, big, empty world to lose himself in, and 
by depending upon himself he finds he amounts 
to just what he can do with his two hands. And 
the Desert helps a chap to look on the little 
things of life in a bigger way. And there's an- 
other thing; a man gets a chance to take him- 
self aside and talk to himself, and that's a thing 
we don't do any too much, except old Desert 
Rats, and they talk to themselves all the time. 
There are no signs of warning in the Desert, no 
morals and no messages. I reckon a real mes- 
sage is an illuminating thought, but. Stranger, 
if you find by chance a single one along this 
trail, it will not be painted on a rock. It lies, 
my Desert, east of the Sierras, in The Land 
Where The Sunsets Go. There may be hotter 
deserts, but all of desert life seems centered 
there, even to the Desert Rats. Oh, yes, I know 
a desert is supposed to hold no living thing, but 
even in Death Valley there are fleas ! 

Stranger, if you're an old timer in the Desert 
and these whifFs of desert air bring you one 



bright memory of a vivid, blazing day gone 
by, or if you are from the crowded places and 
you feel a touch of warm, clean desert wind for 
a moment on your check, that will be bueno. 

Orville H. Leonard 
January 1917 
California 



DESERT MONOTONY 

'Tis but a jump from hottest hell 

To where the high snow flies. 

'Tis but a step from a poison well 

To where sweet water lies. 

And in the desert they both may dwell 

'Twixt dawn and the next sunrise. 

Leave for a time, O my brother, 
Your ledgers and profits and things. 
Come away from the city's smother 
To the land where the air has wings, 
And you'll find in this land, or another, 
The calm that wide solitude brings. 



And grimness may ride close beside you 

Out here where the desert winds blow. 

And hunger and thirst may betide you, 

And profit may follow you slow. 

But there'll bloom all the soul that's inside you 

In The Land Where The Bright Sunsets Go. 



DO YOU REMEMBER? 



DO YOU REMEMBER? 



Do you remember your infant self when you 
were a lad of five, when it seemed that your 
Daddy was made of pelf and the biggest, finest 
being alive? And do you remember how long 
the day when your Daddy told you at breakfast 
time that he would bring you some longed-for 
treasure when he came home at night, and how 
you lived in the happy thought, crossed with 
fears that he might forget? How the speeding 
minutes stretched out to years and your eager 
thoughts, 'twixt hopes and fears, wondered, " Is 
it night yet? " And do you remember how 
bright the world, though lamps were lighted and 
pink clouds curled where the sun had said Good 
Night, when a wonderful being came striding in 
like a god, or Davy Crockett, with a teasing, 
whimsical smile on his face, but his hand in his 
deep coat pocket, and do you believe the prom- 
ise of Heaven could bring to you the joy that 
you felt when you knew that your Daddy'd re- 
membered, when 3'ou were a little boy? Or how, 
in nighty and bare of foot, you stood at the old 
stair-head listening in darkness and misery to 
the laughter and music down below, for you had 

been sent to bed? If you can remember all this, 

3 



4 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

do you think that the uttermost pains of Hell 
could more than equal what you suffered when 
you looked down that old stair-well? And do 
you remember the lights and shadows, the days 
that were gladsome or blue — but whichever the 
kind, they would last forever, and that you cer- 
tainly knew? 

And do you remember your beautiful sweet- 
heart when you were the ripe age of seven and 
she was just three days older, how the whole bot- 
tom dropped out of Heaven when she turned 
on you the cold shoulder and smiled on a boy 
of eleven? 

And do you remember when Sam was the 
marshal and you were the desperado, how he 
chased you over the desert hot till he lost you 
in a tornado, and how, from the cover of sand, 
you shot him with a sling-shot gun and a pebble- 
ball, and when you had grazed his head and 
" got 'im," you didn't like blood at all? 

You have heard fierce tales of desert carnage, 
of lives that were bright and sad, but the desert 
was fiercer, its men were bolder, to you when a 
little lad. And do you remember the wild, bad 
bronco that you had roped on the plains, what 
a bold buckaroo you pictured yourself as you 
pulled hard on the reins, and how, as you 
roweled with home-made spurs and gave him 
command to " steady," you saw him not as 
your own meek pony, and that he had been 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 



gentled already? And when, with a child's 
small shovel and pick, you placered the brook 
for gold, and found in the dark old swimming 
hole a rusty gun, its usefulness done, do you 
remember the joy untold it gave to you, little 
Shiner? More than gold to any miner! Do 
you remember the heights and depths you 
reached in one short day's span, how you ran 
the whole gamut of joys and fears when you 
were a little man? 

It is sweet sometimes to recall those days 
with their bright, high lights, their shadows, 
too, for love was about you to keep those shad- 
ows from stretching across the blue. But how 
deep they looked, how dense that shadow^, how 
white that light, for life was all misery or all 
joy when you were a little boy. 

And do you remember how, as a man, you 
wandered afar and saw strange things, how 
lying under the desert star you felt the pull of 
the homing strings? For you'd seen the desert 
of boyhood dreams and, over the mountains, a 
softer clime where grew big pines, w^here flowed 
swift streams down gulches where the nugget 
gold held an alloy you never dreamed that it 
could hold, for you were sure all gold was pure 
when you w^ere a little boy. 



OVER THE CIGAREETS 



THE GREASER 



Far above my little shack, perched on the 
very verge of an old mine dump, I could hear his 
mules' bells tinkling long before he came into 
clear vision round a jutting ridge, and high 
above the tinkling of those bells, could hear the 
tones of his soft southern voice, urging, plead- 
ing, swearing, to keep them moving, keep them 
in the trail, for a mule will climb either up or 
down, and never heed his heavy load, to munch 
some juicy tuft of grass that his sharp eyes 
have spied. The packer bore a good, round 
English name, Horace Older, and to all the 
mines in those wild, lonely mountains he packed 
pinon pine for fuel on the backs of his little 
mules. The steep and shaly canon slopes form 
mighty sounding boards, and so I know he's 
coming before he drives into sight six little 
mules, each with his pifion load, and the packer 
behind on his old white mare. 

The desert has its voices, like the sea, but 
they are different. I have lain upon a sandy 
beach, no human form in sight for miles, w^hich- 
ever way the eye might turn, and heard foot- 



10 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

steps and faint, whispering sounds — footsteps 
that never came. But in the desert mountains 
I hear music, perhaps the music of the spheres, 
who knows? And surely if it ever might be 
heard, 'twould be in those clear, high spaces. 
To me it seems that one who lives alone in these 
wild hills, with rocks and brush, with sun for 
company by day, and sky that's very clear and 
close by night, grows something new within him- 
self, that comes unbidden, unannounced, that 
makes him over new. He may not know it at 
the time, but when he goes back to his kind, he's 
never quite the same. 

But here's my packer almost at my door, and 
I have gone wool-gathering while I watched his 
train wind slowly down the narrow curving trail, 
each mule with its wooden burden. That wood 
is packed from far across the range, from its 
farther side where stunted pinons grow, grip- 
ping their hardy roots into the steep rock slope. 

Horace brings the last mule to a stop in the 
space beside the shack and climbs out of his sad- 
dle with a sigh of relief. His large, round, 
laughing black eyes are set in a full-moon face. 
A thick lock of jet black hair always threatens 
one eye, and a close cropped black mustache 
shades his full red Mexican lips that speak bet- 
ter English than those of many of his Saxon 
brothers. His anatomy, above his belt, is try- 
ing to escape its bounds, for he looks fat and 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 11 



puddlng-soft, but he will ride the trail by day 
and night for weeks on end. He is gladly wel- 
comed, for he is always good company and 
brings the news of every solitary prospector, 
every desert happening. After beans and cof- 
fee w^e sit on the bench outside with our pipes 
and gaze on the floor of the desert, three thou- 
sand feet below. Across that shifting waste of 
sand, upon its farther rim, a tiny oasis of green 
glows vividly beneath the mountains' steep gray 
walls. It is the City of Piilon Pine. 

Horace's mother was a Mexican, his father 
was a Briton. His sense of humor is keen, and 
none of the vengefulness or sulkiness of his race 
has ever blossomed in him — he is all sun and 
laughter, and he speaks even of his own family's 
wrongs at white men's hands with the dispas- 
sionate speech of a cool spectator. His pas- 
sionate speech is all saved up for " those damn 
mules," but if you see him with his foot against 
the belly of a sulky mule, a cinch strap in both 
hands, a stream of lurid talk in two languages 
coming from his lips, his hat in the sand, and his 
black, coarse hair hanging down in his eyes, 
if you see him thus, and speak to him, he an- 
swers with a genial smile and a flash of all his 
strong, white teeth. He loves a shot of hooch, 
and when he's all shot up, his squaw w^ill beat 
him and throw him out of the tepee to sleep it 
off in the sand. He draws no knife under such 



12 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

punishment, but is meek and acquiescent and 
tells about it later with a sheepish grin. 

When the pipes were going strong, he pointed 
across the desert to that spot of vivid color, 
set like a green wafer in the yellow sand. 

" That spot's where I was born, and Mexi- 
cans were thick then in this desert, though it's 
only forty years ago. Americans were new in 
the country and when, one day, a white man was 
killed, a Mexican was accused. Then they got 
together a Vigilance Committee and decreed 
that the Mexicans must all leave town, — by 
noon, the day following the decree, there must 
not be a single Mexican left in it. I was a lad 
of ten, and my mother ran a little bakery across 
from the big saloon. The Mexicans lay low, 
kept out of the way all they could that night, 
but three Mexicans were walking down the street 
when there was a shot, and the Vigilantes 
poured out. They saw the Mexicans and 
chased them up to my mother's door which was 
on a level with the street. The Mexicans threw 
themselves against the door, burst it in, then 
shut and barricaded it. And then the bullets 
flew. They came splitting through the door 
panels, and we threw ourselves flat on the floor, 
so the bullets went over our heads, all but one 
— the one that killed my little sister. Later in 
the night my people left the town. The Mexi- 
cans all hit the trails for the desert in a hurry 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 13 

and by midnight tlicre wasn't one of 'cm left in 
Pinon Pine. 

" The decree took effect at noon of the next 
day, but at sunup, Steve Ridley, one of the 
Vigilantes, rode out into the desert with a forty- 
five in each hand. He rode for miles away from 
Pinon Pine until he met the last three Mexi- 
cans walking along through the deep sand with 
all the household stuff they could carry — all 
that they had left from the homes they were 
driven out of — and Steve Ridley shot 'em all 
dead as they tramped ahead of him. 

" He lives now on a big desert ranch he owns, 
ten miles from Pinon Pine, and is very much re- 
spected." 



I 



A DEAL IN LEATHER 

He was not desert born nor bred, but in those 
sunny, rocky hills where once the placer miner 
set all the world agog. There the cattle browse 
amid the brush, where once stood thick-sown 
pines ; there the great day of the rocker and the 
sluice-box has gone by, for the rancher and the 
cattleman are minting surer gold. And Jerry 
was a cattleman, and at his birth I'm sure he 
was " all dressed " in leather chaps and jingling 
Mexican spurs. There, in his own home land, 
I met him and felt an instant liking for the 
little buckaroo. 

You know those gray eyes with a touch of 
green in them that can look so sober and so 
devilish.'* Jerry's eyes were like that, and they 
could look dangerous. He was small, slender, 
active, and the most generous heart alive. 
There are some people who seem to take a cer- 
tain character from their very names, and there 
are fewer who give their names a meaning of 
their own, despite all our previous associations 
connected with those names. Jerry was of 
these. 

I was riding with him on one of his horses to 

14 



THE LAXD WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 15 



help him bring up a mare from the pasture be- 
low town. The poor animal had cut her foreleg 
badly with barbed wire and we w^ere going to 
take her where she could be treated near home. 

" That damn bronco you're ridin' don't walk 
as he does when I'm on him. Hoocha ! " 

He gave the cowboy cry and brought his 
quirt down across my horse's withers, grinning 
wickedly as the spirited animal danced me over 
the road. Just then an old fellow passed us 
riding an old gray mule. 

" Notice that ole cuss ? That's ole man 
Jackson who used to keep store down to Ulano 
when I was a youngster. Me an' my pardner, 
Pete Galligan, w^as herdin' cattle out in the hills, 
a long way from Ulano, an' one day Pete was 
goin' to the City an', as I needed a new pair 
o' boots, I give Pete the money an' asked him ter 
bring me back a pair, which he done. Along in 
the fall, when my cow-punchin' was over fer the 
season, I come in ter Ulano an' asked Jackson 
fer my store bill, cause I'd just been paid off 
fer the season an' wanted ter settle up my bills 
before any o' them poker sharps down ter the 
saloon pried my roll loose. Jackson took a 
long time ter make out my bill, fer the damn ole 
cuss was slow as the Devil, but finally he handed 
it ter me an' I looked it over careful. 

" * That's all right, Mr. Jackson,' says I, 
' all but that pair o' boots. I ain't had none 



16 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

o' you, I know, 'cause I been up in the hills all 
season, an' Pete brought me a pair from the 
City an' I paid him fer 'em.' 

" ' It's down on the bill, ain't it? ' says he. 

" ' Yes, it's on the bill, but I ain't had 'em.' 

" ' Well, my book is got you charged with a 
pair o' boots, an' it wouldn't be down there if 
you hadn't got 'em.' 

" ' But I tell you I ain't been near this town, 
an' the only boots I got is what Pete brung me.' 

" ' Can't help that. The book says you had 
'em.' 

" * Well,' I says, ' here, I'll pay my bill, all 
but fer them boots, but I'll be damned if I pay 
fer them.' 

" So I paid him and he receipted, on account. 

" 'Bout a week later, as my Dad was drivin' 
by the store, ole Jackson come out an' says, 

" ' Say, Mr. Howard, that boy o' yourn don't 
pay his bills.' 

" ' He don't, eh? What about it? ' 

" ' Well, he got a pair o' boots in here — I 
know, 'cause it's down on my book — an' now 
he says he won't settle fer 'em.' 

" ' I'll see to it,' says Dad. 

" When he come home, him an' me had a 
set-to, an' it resulted in my payin' Jackson's 
bill, but I was pretty sore. 

" A little after that I was in the store with 
Tom Laden, who was buyin' a lot o' stuff, over- 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 17 



alls, sacks, grub, and a pair o' boots. 'Bout 
the time Jackson had finished waitin' on Tom, 
another customer come in, an' the ole man went 
behind the counter ter make change fer him. 
Tom was puttin' on his new boots, fer his others 
was pretty well wore out. 

'' ' How much was them boots, Jerry .^^ ' 
"'That's all right, Tom,' says I. 'They 
was $4.50, but I paid fer 'em some time ago. 
You just walk up ter the counter an' pay fer 
the other stuff, an' ole Jackson won't never see 
them boots.' 

*' Tom done it, an' the ole man never see his 
feet, 'cause he was behind the counter, so he 
took the money fer the other things Tom 
bought, an' we beat it. Course, / didn't get 
my money back, but I made the ole sun of a 
gun ante up fer them boots. Damn his hide ! 
I wouldn't be sittin' comf'table in the saddle 
now if I hadn't squared that deal." 



REVERSION 

On a shaly slope, far up the mountain, there 
lies a lonely grave. The brilliant sunlight 
bathes it ever, save when night shuts in, and then 
the stars come down so close they seem almost 
to touch the rude cross, made of two thin 
boards, where his head rests. Just above it a 
gozzan crops, that capped, he used to swear, a 
ledge of wealth untold. A foot over his head, 
a little zigzag trail leads to a seepage well set 
in the bottom of a narrow canon, a scant half 
mile above. Beneath his feet, a quarter-mile 
below, the canon winds, bathed ever in black 
shadow, and high above the trail that skirts his 
grave, the steep old ore grade runs around a 
bend, then over a high saddle, flanked by two 
mighty buttes, to the fierce and savage land be- 
yond. From the slopes of those high buttes, 
the tops of lofty ranges, like the crests of giant 
petrified waves, melt into the far distance. Be- 
yond that melting distance lies Death Valley, 
crouching and waiting, silent, terrible. The 
hawks by day fly far above, the coyotes yap at 
night, and rattlers coil, and lizards sleep in the 

sunny glare on that little mound of sand — and 

18 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 19 

that is all of life. And over all, a parching sun, 
and everywhere, just rocks and sand and desert 
weeds and brush. In Mexico he worked mines 
to their owners' glad relief, and other places 
knew him to his credit — but he always came 
back. He spent his life to hold this land where 
he is laid away. He gave up all the other lands 
he owned to hold this one bare tract, and lived 
alone in the big redwood bunkhouse, his nearest 
neighbor many miles away, except for three ig- 
norant miners lately come. 

That bunkhouse was his pride. When the 
mines were booming in the good old days, its 
every finished stick was packed on mule back 
from the western coast. Chemist, scientist, and 
scholar, this land of beauty in its very desola- 
tion had claimed Aymer's love and, therefore, 
his attendance. Trips to the cities of either 
coast, on carefully hoarded mone}^, had been 
of no avail, for it w^as in that bitter time, that 
time of fasting and distress for miners w^hen 
wildcat mining schemes had sent investors' 
money glimmering — " no more for them." So 
he came back and lived here all alone, upon one 
meal a day, and he was eighty then. On liis 
nearest neighbor, many miles Siway, he had laid 
one last request, that should he be found dead 
upon his claims, they'd bury him upon the 
sunny slope. So there he is today. 

Miners are superstitious, and they say that 



f 



20 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

at dusk they've seen his tall gray ghost walking 
about the trails, or in the doorway of his old 
redwood bunkhouse. They say he beckons 
them, to tell them where to dig to find the pre- 
cious minerals that he ever swore were there. 
We found in his rough pine board desk the lit- 
tle diary which he kept from day to day, giving 
the petty details of the lonely man, with all his 
time to spend. 

" Today I mended the north trail, that last 
week's storm had gullied out." 

" Today I found a piece of float and assayed 
it. It went $53.26 per ton. Tomorrow I am 
going to follow it up." 

" Last night, I spent all night in patching up 
the back wall of the kitchen. The storm had 
washed big bowlders down against it, broken it 
through, and water was pouring in. Patched the 
wall, went out and deflected the water into the 
canon, repaired the roof where the rain had ripped 
some shingles ofF. At dawn I went to bed." 

" This morning, an hour after dawn, with my 
glasses I saw Pete and Frenchy at the collar of 
their shaft. It is a long way from here, but, at 
that distance, I can see a smile on a man's face — 
with these glasses. They were acting queerly and 
seemed hurried, which is strange for them. After 
looking all around, they shouldered two heavy 
looking sacks and took the upper trail that leads 
into the desert, seven miles above the canon road 
that leads to Piute Springs. I did not see their 



)l 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 21 

Indinii partner, Pancho. Strange — tomorrow I 
am going over to investigate, for drills and single 
jacks were scattered all about. They left them 
so, and I do not like the looks I saw upon their 
brutal faces. I would go today, but I am feeling 
strangely weak. Why did Pete and Frenchy take 
the trail to Malapai Canon? It holds no living 
thing and opens on to the desert, where there is 
no town, not even a single dobe shack. It troubles 
me, this matter." 



And then, next day, we found him, sitting be- 
fore his little redwood table. Everything in 
that bunkliouse was of redwood — even the 
shingles dripped blood when it rained. His 
brown old face was resting on his arms, and al- 
most touching them, the untasted bowl of por- 
ridge that he would never eat. We buried him 
where he wished to lie. And then we found that 
diary and when we came to that last entry we 
hunted up his windlass rope and started for the 
shaft of those three Desert Rats. Their wind- 
lass was still over the shaft, but no windlass 
rope was on it, as we could see from Aymer's 
house with his powerful foreign glasses. And I 
found out why no rope was there when I reached 
that hole and was let down slowly by m}^ friend 
on the rope that we had brought. Tlieir rope 
was lying in snaky loops at the bottom of the 
hole, and something else was lying there, face 
down, with a big rock on its back. It was 



23 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

Pancho, breathing, but far gone. I bound him 
to the rope and we hauled him up to daylight 
and laid him gently by the collar of the shaft. 
With fiery whiskey, forced between his lips, we 
brought him back to consciousness for a mo- 
ment. He had lain in that hole for a day and 
a night and part of another day with a broken 
back, but the one flash of clear vision, which 
seems to come to all of us just before death, was 
his, and he opened his big black eyes and looked 
with keenly seeing glance around the shaft 
mouth. 

" See ! — no — rock — near — edge. Pete 
■ — an' — French — drop — rock — kill — me 
— get — my — share — thirty — thousan' — 
dollar." 

Both the Indian and Mexican in him combined 
their wills to name his enemies and their deed 
with one last straining effort of his breath, for 
then he died. 

We left Pancho where he lay and took the 
trail to Malapai Canon. We had one gun be- 
tween us and I, my heavy quirt, but none of 
these was needed, for where the trail dips down 
a short, steep slope of shifting shale into the 
canon bed, we found Frenchy lying upon his 
back, a big hole in his chest. His sack was gone 
and he was past all help, so we pushed on, not 
up the canon, for it ran for miles that way, then 
brought up short against a sheer rock wall. 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 23 

No, we headed down the canon toward the des- 
ert, and then we saw a laden sack upon the 
rock, and then beyond a bend, a mile below, we 
saw a crumpled heap, and in its hand that other 
sack was clutched — but Pete was dead. His 
wound was in his back. We never knew that 
story save what those pictures told. 

Later, we left with Pancho's squaw, in Piute 
Springs, those sacks. 

We buried Pancho on his claim, not far from 
that deep shaft, and as we rode down the cailon 
bed, after our gruesome duties done, we halted 
for a moment to look back before a jutting but- 
tress of the canon wall should blot that picture 
out. Aymer's rugged gozzan loomed above his 
little cross, and Pancho's cross was there, but 
lower down. The lizards darted among the 
rocks, while sharp and crackling, like derisive 
laughter, came the yapping of a coyote from 
behind old Aymer's shack. 

The desert had come again into its own. 



A NEVADA IDYL 

It was in a land so thirsty that in freighting 
a barrel of whiskey twenty-five miles over the 
desert, seven-eighths of the alcohol was replaced 
with water — curious changes take place in the 
desert — albeit the whiskey did not belong to 
the freighter ; in a land where Indian women go 
bathing in the lakes, when there are any, in na- 
ture's garb, quite unashamed, and care not for 
the white man's eye ; in a land where the Hang- 
man's Tree supported some fifteen human beings 
by the neck for the good and safety of the state 
no longer ago than when we were boys : a savage 
land where nature so quickly wrests her own 
from struggling man that where forty years ago 
dwelt five thousand souls, where twenty saloons 
kept open house all night, where music, dancing, 
drunkenness, sudden wealth, and sudden death 
ran riot, there is nothing left to tell the tale. 
No vestige even of the saloons, shacks, or other 
human activities ; only the coyote who lurks 
ever upon the fringe of human habitation and 
barks and yaps at night, whose eerie chatter 
sounds like savage laughter, " I am only a dog, 

but I have outlived you; you were transients, 

24 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 25 
but this is my home, and I've come back into my 



own." 



Only a mile from this scene, in the shadow of 
the bunkhouse, Lew Mc^Ianus, with an Irish 
name, but a Mormon heart, squatted on his 
heels, his weak, good-natured face bearing a 
reminiscent smile. Too weak for a dangerous 
bad man and really too good at heart, he was 
only an inconsequent Desert Rat. At one time 
a precocious horse thief, then he became, after 
the sheriff had let up on him, a cow-puncher, 
rancher, miner, and finally a locator of claims 
in the vicinity of mines where a boom might 
some day start. The desert is full of such 
dreamers, and how they all live, God only know^s ! 
He had a desert-bred wife, and two small chil- 
dren camped nearby waiting for Dad to bring 
home some dinner, and w^hile they w^aited, he 
squatted on his heels and told me. 

" I was in a saloon over in Nevayda one time. 
The room was plumb full an' there was a big 
bulldawg there what belonged ter the barkeep. 
This here barkeep was some proud of that there 
pup an' claimed that he could jest naturally 
lick anything he ever come acrost. Well, while 
we was all standin' an' settin' 'round, drinkin', 
chewin' the rag, an' some playin' cards, in comes 
a Dago with a monkey. The little cuss warn't 
more'n ten or twelve inches long, an' soon as he 
come in, the bulldawg begun ter show signs of 



26 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

bein' right onfriendly. Barkeep warns the 
Dago, and says he, 

" ' Gmnej, watch out fer your monk, er my 
dawg will eat him up.' 

" Says the Dago, ' Dog no eata da monk. 
Monk licka da dog quick ! ' 

" Well, Sir, the fellers settin' an' standin' 
'round heerd this, an' in them days money was 
easy when it come ter a game or any kind of a 
showdown, so they arranged ter put the money 
agin the dawg. Mr. Dago he showed willin', 
but says he, 

" * My monk, he fighta with two little stick — 
that alia right ? ' 

" They all agreed ter let the monk have his 
two little sticks — they was only a few inches 
long, like two little drumsticks — an' after the 
barkeep had put up his fifty dollars on his 
dawg, they all stood back an' brought the dawg 
an' monk inter the middle of the ring. Well, 
Sir, the minute that little cuss seen that bull 
pup, he gives one spring, landin' right behind 
the dawg's head, between his head and shoulders, 
an' with one of them little drumsticks in each 
hand he begun ter beat that pup's skull so fast 
- — jest like he was beatin' a drum — that them 
little sticks looked like the spokes of a racin' 
sulky in action. That there hound acted like 
he'd discovered a hornet's nest inside his skull, 
fer he run 'round like the Devil was after him, 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO f7 

knockin' men over, under tables, in circles, with 
the monk stickin' tight ter his neck, an' them 
two little sticks goin' like mad. The bulldawg 
couldn't reach Mr. Monk with his teeth, an', 
anyway, I reckon he was too dazed ter map out 
a plan of action. Well, Sir, in about two min- 
utes there warn't no more fight left in that there 
dawg than in this here doodle-bug I jest put my 
hoof on, an' when they clawed that little monk 
off the dawg's back, he had them little sticks 
gripped tight, an' his little eyes was snappin' 
like a rattlesnake's. 

" The Dago got his fifty all right. Yes, Sir, 
yer see some funny things piroutin' 'round this 
here country." 



BOOTLEG 

If you take some plain wood alcohol and add 
a generous dose of water in which cigar stumps 
have been stewed till it's rich and brown, then 
add a little pepper to give it the proper tang, 
the result is bootleg whiskey, which is supplied 
you as a favor in districts that are dry. It is 
a very simple receipt and there are a dozen 
more, but this will serve as a sample of the home 
distiller's art. More accidents, murders, 
broken health, and death from the desert heat 
are chargeable to this deadly stuff than we can 
ever know, and yet its makers can always count 
on their victims' sure support. 

• •••••• 

He stumbled into the desert town, for he could 
not stand upright, leading one little burro, while 
another trailed behind. He was a big and 
husky man, but his heavy shoulders drooped, his 
eyes were narrowed to a slit, his tongue was 
swollen till it filled his mouth, and when he 
spied the wooden trough where the desert horses 
drink, he kneeled against it and plunged his 
head in the tepid water till we had to pull him 

28 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 59 

away. And when he could speak for gasping 
breath, his thickened tongue mumbled out, 

" Go hunt up Jack. I left him out in the 
desert about twelve mile. When we hit the 
desert below the pass, we'd a little water left. 
That lasted about to Soda Springs, but we 
couldn't fill up there, so we hiked along, an' 
pretty soon we must have missed the trail. An' 
then we got kinder loco an' our tongues begun 
ter swell, but I kep' a tol'able rein on me, fer 
Jack w^ent ravin' w41d an' he cussed the sand an' 
cussed the sky an' damned the blazin' sun an' 
shook his tw^o fists at the air an' cussed an' 
cussed an' cussed. An' then he run ter his 
burro an' hunted through his pack till he found 
a bottle o' bootleg that he'd hid out from me. 
He tilted that bottle till it stood straight up, 
an' drunk an' drunk an' drunk, an' as soon as he 
had drawed his breath, he tilted it some more. 
I had jist enough senses left ter leave the damn 
stuff be, an' I tried to make him quit it, too, but 
'twarn't no manner o' use. He'd got that bot- 
tle at Poison Springs, an' he'd jist come off a 
spree. An' then the burros broke away, and 
dow^n in that hot sand Jack was a settin', 
drinkin' an' singin' little foolish songs. I 
couldn't carry him, nary foot. I could only 
walk, myself, an' I thinks I'll hit the trail some- 
wheres an' send back ter bring him in." 

He had forgotten, when he told his tale, that 



30 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

he'd led his burro in, his partner's following 
on behind — but perhaps he did not know. 

" An' I wandered all that afternoon, an' all 
one hellish night, a stumblin', crawlin', fallin' 
down, an' all this hell of a day. I didn't know 
where I was at, I jist follered my nose, an' hiked. 
I wasn't keepin' ter no beat trail, plumb instinct 
brung me here, an' poor ole Jack is out there 
yet, so you jist find him pronto." 

A dozen horsemen saddled quick and took to 
the desert floor, tracking the miner's weaving 
steps till they saw in the distance a darker hud- 
dle against the yellow sands. When they rode 
close, they saw a man beneath a big sage-bush. 
He lay on the flat of his big, broad back, his 
blackened face to the sky, while high in the air 
two big buzzards floated lazily. His right hand 
clutched an empty bottle — he had drunk his 
last bootleg. 



RECONCILIATION 

The talk was on sudden death. 

He was an old miner, mj nearest neighbor in 
the mountains overlooking the desert, and 
though his tall figure was slightly bent, his wide- 
open, steady, steel-gray eye — a sharpshooter's 
eye — was youthful in its keenness of vision, 
withal it had a look of childlike wonderment at 
times, and ever a kindly humor. 

" There was a young feller I knew back in 
Coloraydo — he'd shot a feller who'd swore ter 
kill him, an' when this bad hombre run fer his 
Winchester, this young feller I'm speakin' of 
run faster, got ter his first an' pumped seven 
bullets inter this other feller at close range — 
not more'n thirty foot. One bullet would a 
done the work, but this young friend o' mine was 
so excited that he didn't know what he was 
doin'. O' course, he got ofF on the plea o' 
self-defense, which was right, but after that, at 
night, he'd sit on the edge o' his bunk, lookin' 
down sorrowful like, an' when I'd ask him how 
things come, he'd tell me, 

" ' I can't seem to git the thought out o' my 
mind that I've killed a man, even if 'twas in self- 
defense.' 

31 



32 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

" Then I tells him, ' What you want ter do, 
Ed, is to git out o' this house where the thing 
happened an' where you're all the time livin' 
over it an' seein' him 'round. You want ter git 
out where they's people an' fergit it.' 

" He went, but I don't know how it ever come 
out with him. 

" I seen enough an' I don't never want ter use 
my gun if I can git out o' it, fer it's a awful 
thing ter feel that a man might be livin' this min- 
ute but fer you, even when it was a question o' 
self-defense. I was some hot-headed myself 
when I was a kid, but I don't never want ter 
draw a gun no more, though I was ready and 
willin' ter in them days. 

" One time I was out on a prospectin' aiC 
fishin' trip with a chum o' mine named Weston, 
up near Buffalo, in Coloraydo. One day we 
come across a deserted cabin. 'Twas full o' 
grub an' in fine shape, but the fire had been 
dead fer days an' we could see no one was livin' 
there. We built a fire an' helped ourselves ter 
what we needed, fer we'd left our outfit below 
an' was some hungry. We did that way in 
them days, when we found a shack on the trail 
an' nobody home. All any one asked was fer 
the stranger ter leave things clean an' ship- 
shape. We had a good square meal, then we 
pulled out. 

" Weston's uncle, a feller named The Hender- 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 33 



son, who lived up the gulch 'bout one or three 
miles above this here shack, was a pretty hard 
nut, an' it seems he'd bought the outfit we found 
in the empty shack from two fellers who'd 
stocked it up an' then pulled out ahead o' time. 
Henderson had tracked us ter the cabin, an' 
the next time he sees Weston he accuses him an' 
me o' takin' this here grub w^hich he'd bought. 
Weston tells me about it an', bein' young an' 
hot-headed, I says ter him, 

" ' Damn him, I ain't goin' ter let no man 
call me a thief, an' when I sees him, he's goin' 
ter eat them words.' 

" An' Weston, bein' my pardner, says, ' 0' 
course. Me, too.' For The, bein' his uncle, 
didn't make no difference ter Jim. 

" In them days I was skinner, bull-whacker, 
any ole thing, an' my nearest neighbor, ole Jeff 
Prouty, says ter me a few days later, 

" ' Jack, I got a load o' cedar posts I got ter 
git ter town. When you go ter town will you 
whack them bulls o' mine in, them a snakin' them 
cedar posts ? ' 

" ' Sure,' says I. 

" The next day I went, whackin' Jeff's ox 
team, the wagon piled high with cedar, an' goin' 
through the woods I w^as w^alkin' alongside the 
team. The day was hot an' I took my coat off 
an' throwed it on the high seat, leavin' my Smith 
an' Wesson in the side pocket o' it, when The 



34 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

Henderson come towards me, drivin' a team o' 
little mules he had. 

" ' Hold on, I want ter speak ter you,' I says 
when he'd drew up close. So he stops. 

" ' Did you,' I says, ' say ter Jim Weston 
that him an' me stole anything from you ? ' 

" * Yes,' he says, ' I said them words.' 

" ' Then,' I says, ' you're a damn liar, an' you 
git down fer I'm go in' ter lick you.' 

" He climbed down quick, fer he was a 
scrapper, but he pulled out a long knife as he 
come, an' me with my gun in my coat pocket on 
the wagon seat ! But I was pretty quick in 
them days an' I hadn't more'n seen that knife 
when I'd flipped my coat over the wheel an' had 
my hand in the pocket, but the damn gun had 
slipped through a hole in the linin'. I didn't 
wait ter dig it out, but brought it away linin' 
an' all an' had him covered when he come round 
in front o' his mule team — he was comin' some, 
too, with his knife raised, but when he seen he 
was covered he says, 

" ' Oh, well, you've got the drop on me, all 
right. O' course, with a gun you got a unfair 
advantage at this distance.' 

" ' Yes,' says I, 'an' when you come at me with 
a knife, seein' I had no gun on me, 'twarn't 
nothin' unfair in that advantage, I reckon? 
Tell you what I'll do — I'll meet you anywhere 
you say an' you can use any gun you like, an' 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 35 



we'll have our friends there ter see fair play.' 

*• He agreed ter that an' we met in a big sa- 
loon in Denver. He had a bunch o' his friends 
at his back an' I had mine, an' he had his gun 
handy, likewise me. While we was glarin' at 
each other, all too willin' to start the business 
o' drillin' holes, one o' his friends, with more 
sense than common, got him by the pistol arm 
an' begins ter argue. 

" ' The,' says he, ' with two such shots as you 
two fellers is, one o' you is sure ter drop, mebbe 
both, an' you're married an' got kids ter think 
about. I don't know what this muss is all 
about, but 'tain't right.' 

" Then one o' my friends asks me what it's all 
about, an' I tells him. 

" ' Hell, I know Jack here didn't steal nothin' 
from nobody, an' it's up ter Henderson ter 
apologize.' 

"*That goes with me,' I says. 'If The 
apologizes, there ain't no quarrel.' 

" After some talky talk The kind o' grins an' 
says, ' Well, I reckon mebbe you ain't no thief, 
after all. Jack, so I take back them words.' 

" ' 0. K.,' says I. ' An' since you've taken 
them back. The, they'll need washin' down an' 
drownin', so the drinks is on me all round.' 

" W^e had 'em. But I reckon them words 
needed more o' the washin' down process, fer 
The said it was his turn ter do some sluicin', an' 



36 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

the last I c'n remember, The was slappin' me on 
the shoulder, grippin' my hand, an' proclaimin' 
that I was the only honest man an' that he'd 
trust me with untold gold. 

" I reckon 'twarn't no very edifyin' sight, but 
they do speak o' that night yit as one o' the 
events o' that day, us bein' all lit up, which was 
some better than havin' daylight let inter us 
violent. 

" Even in these days o' peace an' softness 
when a man ain't hardly let ter pack a gun, it's 
handy ter have it round, fer when you need it, 
you need it jist as bad as in them days," and he 
gripped the shiny butt lovingly. 

For Jack still carries his old long-barreled 
Smith and Wesson. 



HIS BEST BELOVED SON 

West from the desert over the mountains 
many, many miles there is a land that has lain 
asleep since the early mining days. There the 
manzanita and the chaparral replace the desert 
cactus and its rounded gray-green sage. There 
tall, dark pines grow in small clumps, where 
once were mighty forests. There, too, deep 
rocky gulches cut all the brush-clad hills 
through which the swift roaring floods pour in 
the rainy time, but for eight or nine months 
in the year one crosses them dry-shod. Then 
they are dry as a lava bed and the desert is 
scarcely hotter, for it is a semi-arid land. 
There, too, crawl the tarantula, the scorpion, 
and the lizard, but the lizard is small and slaty- 
gray, not the desert lizard of every size, nor 
with its brilliant coloring. It is a cattle coun- 
try, in a wa}^ and in one place and another a 
patch of noble forest yields its logs, but the 
great, old mines that filled the land with eager, 
searching men seem dead. Though now inert 
these many years, perchance they are but sleep- 
ing. 

It is not a farming land, though here and 

37 



38 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

there a flat, a little swale, or narrow bench will 
grow green things to giant size, and big, deli- 
cious fruits. All up and down, the steep gulch 
slopes are sown with dark green pines, with now 
and then a bull pine bearing its feathery bluish 
needles. There the deer play by the roadside 
and at night the wildcat calls and, in the deeper 
forest, the mountain lion prowls. No, it is not 
a rancher's land, yet it holds the charm of wild 
and rugged beauty that ranches could not give. 

It was in this country we were hunting him, 
the sheriff, the old cattleman, and I, and the cat- 
tleman was telling me the story. Nature had 
given the cattleman a tall, strong body, but an 
accident at birth had twisted and deformed it, 
but not his heart which was big and generous. 
Nor had it spoiled his laugh which was ever 
ready and joyous. His horses, his time, and his 
money were ever at the call of those who needed 
them. He could see a cow hidden in the chami- 
sal where I could see only a blur, and so he was 
a valuable member of the party. 

" It was about thirty-five years ago he first 
come here an' opened a general store on one side 
o' the street, an' a fine saloon on the other. 
Niels Andersen is a Dane, o' course, as his name 
shows, but he talks jist like you an' me. His 
life has told on him, but he's still a husky feller, 
an' in them days he was some man! His blue 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO S9 

eyes could snap like the Devil when he was 
drunk, an' be the softest, gentlest eyes 3'ou ever 
saw when he was right, but they got, mostly, 
tcr snappin' like the Devil, fer he got ter sam- 
plin' too much o' his stock over ter the saloon, 
an' the worst o' it was that when he got drunk 
he always wanted ter kill some one — one o' his 
best friends, fer choice. 

" Ter tills day, him an' his old chum, Ike 
Jamieson, don't speak, fer he pulled a gun on 
Jamieson in his store one day when Ike was 
in there buyin' something, an' if Ike hadn't got 
ter his gun hand pronto an' taken his gun away, 
there'd been doin's right then. Ole Jed Bran- 
some, the sheriff, didn't want ter do nothin', fer 
he was a good feller with everybody in the 
County, an' Andersen an' him was friends, An- 
dersen bein' a prominent citizen, as you might 
say. It got worse an' worse, though, an' one 
evening, 'bout dusk, Andersen come through the 
door o' his store, a forty-five in each hand, firin' 
as he come. He nicked the door-post jist be- 
hind the ear of a feller standin' there — Hell ! 
no, he didn't know the cuss, he was jist shootin'. 
Then he wheeled round an' fired up an' down 
the street. Jed comes up ter Bill Minturn — 
Bill was a friend o' Andersen's an' a big, power- 
ful feller, too — and Jed says, 

" * Bill, I don't want ter arrest Niels an' get 



40 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

him in disgrace, an' make any fuss. You git 
him in a corner somewhere an' take them guns 
away from him, will you? ' 

" So Bill coaxes Niels ter go over ter the 
dance-hall, an' that's a new idea ter Andersen 
so he goes along, delighted with, the doin' some- 
thing. As they goes in the door, Niels first, 
Bill come up close behind him, pins both arms 
ter his sides, an' then another friend took his 
guns away. Mad ! He was ready ter kill the 
whole town. He got about half sober next day, 
but he was broodin' and ugly, an' I reckon back 
som'ers in his mind was the drunken notion that 
he'd been took advantage of by his friends when 
they wheedled his hardware outer him. 

" Now Niels was jist about all o' a man when 
he was sober, an' his wife was the sweetest, big 
blue-eyed woman you'd meet in a week, an' she 
jist worshipped Niels, only fer that wicked 
drunken temper o' his, an' Lord knows it was 
a plenty. She couldn't do nothin' ter make him 
quit, an' she couldn't do nothin' with him, 
neither, when he was on the war-path. 

" Well, this day after his little fireworks 
play, he was in his saloon, broodin' like, an' 
there was three-five fellers in there drinkin', 
when Mrs. Andersen come across from the store 
ter speak ter him about somethin'. You know, 
pardner, how a crazy idea will come ter the 
front pronto in a drunk's brain .f' It did then. 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 41 

No sooner he see his wife come in them swing 
doors than Niels whips out his two heavy forty- 
fives. One o' them he throws on the bunch that 
was drinkin', an' yells, ' Git inter that corner, 
you danm coyotes, an' face this way, han's up,' 
and he kept his gun playin' back an' forth over 
'em like lightnin'. And then he turns to Min- 
nie and yells, ' Pull up your skirts an' dance, 
damn you, too ! I'll show you all I'm boss in 
my own shanty, anyhow.' 

" Well, sir, that big, handsome, home-bred 
Indiana girl, with a look o' pain and humiliation 
in her blue eyes, pulled her skirts up ter her 
knees an' danced before that corner full o' cow- 
punchers, their han's reachin' fer the ceilin' an' 
their eyes goggled, mostly on account o' Niels' 
gun, an' when she couldn't stand up no more, 
he drove her out at the end o' his gun, an' the 
held-up bunch after her. 

" The last o' her boys was born soon after — 
too soon, a long ways too soon. When Niels 
woke up an' all he'd done come back on him, he 
cried like a baby an' went down on his knees ter 
her. That was his last rampage, but the mis- 
chief was done. An' Minnie Andersen growed 
thin an' faded. You know the dead look she al- 
ways has on her face, an' her whole body acts 
listless like an' sort o' don't care a damn. 

" Now, they talk about God's mercy and kind- 
ness, so it don't seem jist square that a man's 



42 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

weaknesses should be handed down ter a inno- 
cent kid — ain't that right ? Karl Andersen, 
you savvy, was the youngest boy — him that 
was born soon after that dancin' an' gun party 
— an' he's a right husky, upstandin', powerful 
boy, an' he's got his mother's big, fearless, 
steady blue eyes, but — well, they don't look 
jist right. 

" Niels has a heap o' friends here who don't 
hold nothin' agin' him on account o' the past, 
fer there's one fine thing about our little town 
an' this whole Country, too. No matter what 
man or woman has done, if they turn their faces 
ter the front and tries ter keep 'em there, the 
past is clean forgot, and that is what it ought 
ter be, fer I reckon we're all of us little igno- 
rant children learnin' by mistakes." 

The cow-horse senses anything strange in the 
brush before his rider sees it, and our horses 
were pricking their ears forward and stepping 
high. As we rounded a clump of manzanitas 
the object of our two days' search stood over a 
little pool, his broad shoulders and tall, power- 
ful frame reflected in the water. He was talk- 
ing to his image, and when he heard the thud 
of hoofs and jingle of bits he straightened up 
and met our eyes. In his large blue eyes was 
the mournful look one sees sometimes in the eyes 
of a dog. He had run away from home, and 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 43 

for two days and niglits had tramped without 
cither rest or food. 

His name is Karl Andersen, and he is a liopc- 
less epileptic. 



p 



A SKINNER'S DAY 

The ten-mule team comes clanking in in the 
yellow afterglow hauling a heavy wagon bear- 
ing a load of ore. They walk fetlock-deep in 
finest dust that swirls above and around the 
skinner, and so he rides in a veiling cloud tinged 
by the evening light. His wagon he leaves be- 
side a car to which its ore is to be transferred, 
for the only train leaves town at dawn. Then 
his unhitched mules with chains a- jingle go 
scuffling wearily through the dust to the big cor- 
ral on the edge of town. 

After the heavy harness is stripped from 
dusty, sweat-streaked backs, they crowd to the 
wooden drinking-trough while the skinner ap- 
portions to each mule his share of barley and 
hay. Then gates are clicked, and the tired 
skinner, after a sousing at the tap, comes to the 
hotel dining-room, where at a long and narrow 
table he eats a silent meal. Then a wait in a 
throng of his desert friends while the mail is 
handed out, then the news is greedily scanned, 
then the Imperial Bar Room swallows him. 
There he finds his night cronies seated about a 
large round table, gambling absorbedly for 

small stakes. He joins them and plays until 

44 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 45 

nine o'clock, wlien lie leaves them for the night. 
Then uj) in the morning at four o'clock to get 
his breakfast in the empt}^ hotel dining-room, 
collect the mail, look over his wagon for weak- 
ened parts, then the mules are hitched, the har- 
ness scanned for any worn or weakened spots, 
then his team rumbles noisily out of town, the 
jolt of his empty wagon greeting the waking 
ears of a later riser here and there. 

Up through the gently sloping desert plods 
slowly the panting team, the heavy yellow sand 
pouring in cascades from the wagon wheels, and 
then low hills are reached, the road still wind- 
ing upward along a sandy slope with high, 
brush-studded waves of sand enfolding it to 
right and left, and then a tiny caiion engulfs 
the struggling team, and then a deeper one, its 
sides of yellow broken porphyry holding no sin- 
gle blade of grass in any of their cre^dces. 
Above, it narrows to a deep dark cut of purple 
granite, black with shadow, verdureless and 
lifeless, like a picture by Dore. That cut is the 
lower gateway to a bare and rock-strewn hill 
hemmed all about with mountain walls, purple, 
yellow, gray. Still up the road winds, through 
another gate, this time of hard blue limestone 
seamed with veins of white, then out through 
this higher gateway to another bare steep slope, 
but only bare of rocks, for the joshua-tree, the 
cactus, and the sage-bush flourish there. 



46 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

On to this desert pasture open the mouths of 
draws and canons that through the countless 
ages the upper floods have cut. Into the black- 
est, deepest, coldest of those cailon mouths, the 
skinner's team has wound, and there, just out of 
sight around its lower bastion, his blacksnake 
cracks like a pistol shot, for he is only half way 
up and his mules are wearying. Six hours to 
go eight miles, for he is bound for a mine on a 
steep bare slope lying below the snow, and the 
skinner walks those miles. With his rawhide 
hanging over his shoulder, with both hands 
gathering rocks that he throws at any mule he 
sees who isn't pulling his pound, the skinner's 
face is beginning to redden, his language is 
warming up, for, though the time is but mid- 
morning, the hot desert sun is chasing the shad- 
ows out of the night-cooled canon, and it tries 
his temper to see one mule doing the work of 
two, and it tries it more when a well aimed rock 
thrown at the ribs of the laggard mate, bounds 
off with the sound of rock on bone, the mule 
never even flicking his tail to acknowledge a 
center shot. 

It is almost true, what I've often heard, that 
you cannot hurt a mule. Rocks and black- 
snakes he minds but little, and when he deems 
that his energies have been used as much as they 
should, right there he quits till, in his own mind, 
he is recuperated. Some of us good Americans 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 47 

with our hustle and rush and overwork would 
not be demeaning ourselves to learn from the 
good American mule, for he'll work like — a 
mule, but will take it slow, without nervous 
hurry or fuss, and will last twice as long as a 
powerful horse very much larger than he. No 
one may fathom the mulish mind, but perchance 
as he stands, clean limbed and sound, after 
thirty hard-working years, and sees a worn-out 
horse go by, his throat-splitting bray is the 
laugh of contempt the wise has for the fool, for 
he is as sound as a bell at thirty, that horse 
broken down at ten. No, maybe one " can't 
kill a damn mule," but the mule has a voice in 
that, and in that voice he tells himself, " I will 
save my strength for a future need, for I see 
hard work ahead." 

But the skinner has reached the mine at last, 
and while his mules with their nose-bags on are 
swishing their ratty tails, he eats with the 
miners a hearty dinner in their big boarding- 
house. The news of the town he brings to them 
and takes back mining news. Then the sacks 
of ore are loaded on his heavy, wide-tired 
wagon, and with a parting adios he starts down 
the mountain side, while the whine and shriek of 
brake on tire fills all the caiion bed. He is rid- 
ing the big nigh wheeler now, one hand holding 
a thin stout line that runs to the leaders' heads, 



48 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

the other grasping his brake. Sometimes his 
wagon bumps off the grade, overturning and 
dumping out its load of heavy ore sacks that lie 
scattered about the steep incline ; then he must 
right the upturned wagon, and load it a second 
time. Sometimes the canon road's so blocked 
with snow he cannot get up ; then he leaves his 
wagon stuck in the snow and takes the trail for 
town, to come back when the road is open. 
Meanwhile the mules he has taken back are eat- 
ing their heads off at his expense. Sometimes 
when struggling up the grade he will see a cloud- 
burst threatening in the mountains high above ; 
then every living thing must leave the road that 
follows the canon bed, for that is the cloud- 
burst's watercourse. He must unhitch his 
mules, leave his wagon, and take to the canon 
slopes, only to find, when the flood has passed, 
that his wagon is buried in mud and stones and 
loaded with boulders from the flood that has 
rolled over it. And sometimes his brake snaps 
in a dangerous spot ; and then — he curses 
mules no more. 

His face is burned to a bright, brick red, his 
eyes are crinkled up from squinting into the 
desert sun, his hair is none too thick, but his 
mustache makes up for that for he doesn't get 
time to shave. The tiny cigarette he smokes is 
buried in its shade. His voice is low and his 
speech is gentle when he is with his friends. 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 49 

No fiery words escape his lips, no oaths, nor any 
violence, save when he's skinning mules. Then 
he's a raging demon, and tlie vilest names he 
flings at them, blood curdling oaths and bitter- 
est curses he hurls at their wagging ears. 

The purple wall goes sheerly up till, twenty 
feet above its base, it overhangs the road, upon 
whose other side there stands a giant boulder, 
purple, too, bastioning the narrow road from 
the deep gorge below. So narrow is that canon 
track between that sheer wall and that rock, 
that wagon hubs will almost graze its sides, 
and just below that narrow portal the road 
drops at a dizzy slant, then vanishes around a 
point. The rocks are purple and the purple 
dust is deep upon the road. But for a little 
while at noon, a sword flash drops down from 
the sun to cut the gloom, then all is purple dark 
again. There dusk comes quickly in mid-after- 
noon, and all the nameless terrors of the moun- 
tains of the desert seem centred in that spot. 
It is The Devil's Gate. 

The skinner came bumping down the grade 
and he was cursing lustily. He had to pass 
through the Devil's Gate for it lies on the only 
road between the mines far up the mountain side 
and the town and station far below, and as he 
swung around to the Gate, a purple dust cloud 
billowed ahead, enveloped, and followed him. 



50 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

while the brake shoes clamping the heavy wheels 
were whining against the tires. The skinner 
was riding the big nigh wheeler when his leaders 
squeezed through the narrow pass and dropped 
down the purple road below. He was barking 
curses at the leaders when the overstrained 
brakes broke and the massive wagon with its 
heavy load ran on to the wheelers with crush- 
ing force, then plowed its way to the very heart 
of writhing bodies and thrashing legs, — a 
grim, relentless Juggernaut, till halted in the 
choked-up way, while the death screams of ten 
powerful mules cut through the purple gloom. 
And then the Gate was very still — the skin- 
ner would curse no more. 

High up the opposite canon wall, above the 
shadowed gorge, a jutting spire of stone stood 
up. It was the favorite lookout of a big brown 
hawk who rose with a beat of powerful wings 
and mounted to the blue, for strange, new 
sounds assailed his ears from the shadowed road 
below. Then from the line of blue above, a 
dusky-plumaged buzzard came floating down 
the canon with lazy, but sure, intent to perch 
upon the eyrie of the hawk. With bright sharp 
eyes and folded wings he waited, the patience of 
the ages in his pose. 



ASPIRATION 

There was no earth, there was no sky, nor any 
air between ; naught but a swirl of bitter dust 
that filled the mouth and ears and eyes of the 
young Desert Rat. Too young he was to read 
the signs, so a sand-storm in the desert was his 
fate. Six burros he had started with, six bur- 
ros he had lost, for they had drifted before the 
storm and were never seen again. Since their 
packs held his water and all his grub, his 
clothes, and his mining tools, a bare human 
atom he was left in the midst of a howling waste. 
His eyes were filled with burning sand, but there 
was naught for eyes to see ; his feet w^ere heavy 
in yielding sand, but there was nowhere for feet 
to go ; and his throat, as well as his mouth, was 
full of the hot and gritty dust, but there was no 
water to ease his throat if the dust had not been 
there. First he was gripped with wild despair, 
then came dull apathy, then a benumbed w^ak- 
ing sleep, and after long hours he dropped to 
his knees and crawled through the sand, with 
head bowed down like any desert thing. 

Where a moist spot shows in the desert, the 

51 



52 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

blowing sand will stick and grow and pile upon 
itself till a big sand-dune is formed. When the 
poor blinded, crawling thing met one of those 
big dunes, with gripping fingers and bleeding 
knees he crawled through cascades of sliding 
sand, like a wounded snake, to the top. His 
tongue was swollen. It filled his mouth and 
protruded between his lips till he could not even 
mutter, but he had one conscious thought, " I 
must keep alive till I reach the top, so they will 
see my bones, and since I must surely die today, 
I will die as high as I can." 

The fierce storm ended, the wind died down, 
the shifting, driving sand was still, as though 
the desert had done its worst and had stopped 
to catch its breath. And still was the lifeless, 
crumpled form that lay on that dune of sand. 
Then the moon peeped over the desert's rim, 
throwing its clear, soft radiance on cones and 
ridges and waves of sand, while, but a short 
stone's throw from that big sand-dune, a desert 
surveyor's fire winked red beneath the moon. 



THE SKINNER 



The time is evening, and the hills are blue- 
black all about. Upon the desert's farther rim, 
a band of yellow light, and rising from the 
desert floor, a tiny pufFed-up cloud of dust 
comes rolling ever close. 'Tis nothing but a 
smoky cloud. There's never a thing in sight, 
save that ever growing ball of dust, expanding 
as it nears. Across the road a coyote runs and 
scuttles into the brush. Even the lizards do 
not stir, for it is that hour 'twixt day and night 
when the wind of the desert is still, when the day 
has ceased to breathe, when night is stretcliing 
her arms aloft ere opening starry eyes. The 
hush of evening settles down, and still that cloud 
comes on, over the brush and the malapai ; 
across the cracked, dry bed of an ancient lake 
that ages back had been fed by long dried 
streams ; through deep gullies and over bumps ; 
still keeping the twisting road, till a couple of 
galloping mules spring out of the rolling yellow 
cloud, and another pair, and another, until 
twelve big mules flash by, then the skinner, 
standing up in his seat and leaning against the 
lines, while liis blacksnake coils and whistles and 
cracks. For one brief flashing space his face 

53 



54 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

gleams with wild fury against the dying light 
— and then he is by and out of sight, and the 
dust cloud rolls behind. 

Then, after a week had gone, I saw him in a 
hospital. 

Ten miles along, after he flashed by, the 
wagon-tongue broke and he was pulled down 
off his box and dragged through a big sage- 
brush that tore his eyes till the lids swelled shut 
and stripped his hands of flesh to the bone. So 
he had to drop the lines. He wandered that 
night and for four long days in a hot and aim- 
less hell, till a Desert Rat discovered him and 
led him to a town. 

He had hauled ore to a distant town, and 
was bringing back supplies. He left there with 
two bottles — that were empty when he passed. 

And the rest is a story that is told. He will 
never see again. 



ON AND OFF THE TRAIL 



CIVILIZATION 



We call it the desert, yet it is filled with 
varied forms of life, life which is throbbing, 
vital, but no kin to the life exotic to it — that 
of humanity. The human touch on its edges 
and in little spots we call oases only intensifies 
its own independent life and charm and terror, 
and man recognizes its power when he decrees 
that any wanderer shall have the right to stop 
a desert train for water. The human dramas 
on its borders, which to us loom so big, seem 
insignificant when we are enveloped in its brood- 
ing strength. 

The desert dead.^ Not so — the side-winder 
stirs beside the sandy track ; the road-runners, 
in pairs, scuttle ahead of my horse, seemingly 
taking pride in winning a race against him ; it is 
the coyote's home ; and the sky is sometimes 
black with wild ducks who have left the shore 
of some undrinkable lake. And color, surely, 
is a part of life. Not twice will the same hues 
assail the eye. The cactus flower bears the 
color of the rose. The greasewood and the 
sage-brush look different, and the color of the 

57 



58 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

skies at dawn and dusk never seems the same 
two days together. 

The desert whispered to itself before man 
ever trod it, but now it takes his accent, for be- 
neath a leaning sign-post at the end of an old 
worn track, lie the bleaching bones of a horse, 
and far along on the selfsame trail is an empty 
whiskey bottle. Poor weapon with which to 
fight you, Desert ! 

And you have your own forms of tiny insect 
life that burrow in your sands, and you are 
framed in wild and savage beauty, for where the 
winter snows of the Sierras are poured upon 
your glittering yellow bosom, the creeks that 
carry those clear icy waters are banked with 
cottonwoods and tall green grasses, while on 
your other side lie other mountains, stern and 
cold and dead, that hold the treasures of a thou- 
sand cities within their gloomy canons. The 
tiny holes and puny tracks that man has made 
upon those mighty ridges are but as ants' work 
in a dusty road, and in the space of one man's 
little life the monuments to human evolution of 
brain and high endeavor will all be gently, 
surely, wiped away. This is not done by you 
in savage anger, but slowly and inexorably, yet 
surely as the drifting of your sands — and 
yet not quite. 

There is one trivial thing outlasts man's 
nobler monuments ; a thing of interest to the 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 59 



burro's eye, a keen reminder of some vanished 
camp, a symbol of man's economic art, per- 
chance the savior of some desert wanderer's life 
— an old tomato can ! 



DAWN 

The cold, stark body of those grim, bleak 
mountains shows gray and brown against a 
clear blue sky ; by day, its dazzling blue a 
menace in its sameness, but when the night has 
blown its candles out, when against a sky of 
purple and of gray, huge rosy clouds are pil- 
lowed above the taller buttes, whose topmost 
edges only are tipped with purest gold, then 
those miountains show no longer grim and bleak, 
but soft with velvet shadows, blue-black shading 
into green. The broad, flat desert, miles below, 
is still in dusky shadow, save where the sun is 
climbing over a saddle further down, sending 
one long, golden lance quivering across its gray- 
ness. Beyond that lower desert, the ramparts 
of the gray Sierras rise, their snowy peaks 
bathed all in rosy light, while yet all's dusk 
below. 

The sounds of night have fled, the coyote is 

asleep, while day still lingers o'er the rosy 

images of sweet, unfinished dreams, and for a 

precious moment the whole wide world is still. 

The hush, the silence, the suspended life of a 

primeval world hold for a single breath, while 

60 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 61 

birth, creation, all life's purest forms are blos- 
soming anew as in the earth's first dawn. 



There is a bit of cotton rope holds back my 
cabin door, its end frayed out, A tiny hum- 
ming-bird, bearing the hues of midnight and the 
dawn, of high noon and of dusk, upon his bril- 
hant iridescent body, poises in the first bright 
shaft of level sun from over the lowest peak, 
and darts his sharp bill into that frayed out 
floss, gathering down to remake last night's 
bed. 

And then I know 'tis day. 



COMPENSATION 

There is a grim gray rampart that I know, 
its jagged ridge sharp cut against the sky, 
while over all its mighty height and breadth, 
broods stark, dead desolation. From miles 
away it gazes over lower peaks upon the yellow, 
hot, and dusty desert that seems, by contrast, 
teeming with quick life. No eagle wheels above 
that steep, gray wall, nor hav/k nor buzzard 
circles in the blue. No earth, no weed, nor any 
desert growth finds lodgment in a crevice of its 
rock. Even the lizard shuns its steep, bare 
slope. The coyote circles round with slinking 
glance, nor breaks its deathlike silence with his 
multi-echoing bark. It holds not even life 
enough to please a hermit ghost. 

And yet, when day is fading, and it stands 

out purple-black against the rosy clouds of 

dusk, it holds a certain beauty in its gloomy 

loneliness. Then, when the evening has closed 

in and velvet night comes forth, it towers a 

weird and mighty shape against the paler sky. 

And in the stillest watches of the night, when 

all wild nature's throbbing in its sleep, the 

frosty, glittering stars stoop low to kiss its 

62 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 63 

stony brow, for, though its foot is covered deep 
in sharp edged shifting shale, its lofty head 
rears proudly up to mingle with the brilliant 
spheres that lower mountains may not reach — 
and mocks at desolation. 



A DESERT GARDEN 

There is a tiny canon in the desert mountains 
that opens out above on to a rock-strewn tree- 
less slope. Its sides are bare and rocky, with 
here and there a sage-bush or a dying joshua- 
tree, but in the narrow tunnel of that canon 
bed, a veritable garden blooms, for the sunlight 
shines there ever since it opens to the west. 

They are not giant growths, so there is more 
room in which to crowd the flora of the desert, 
and in that narrow space is all the story of a 
desert life. Struggling up through beds of 
thin, sharp, slaty shale that tinkles with the 
sound of broken glass when trod upon, there 
sprouts the pale geranium, its brilliant scarlet 
faded to a paler red in the fierce desert sun. 
There sprouts the desert holly, too, with leaves 
of frosty, pale gray-green and berries like pallid 
strawberries, not glowing with the brilliant red 
of colder eastern climes. There is the desert 
palm — the j oshua-tree, with lance-like spines 
and stunted trunk that in the dusk a desert 
horse will look at twice, so much it seems a si- 
lent, watching guard, a desert sentinel. The 

gnarled and sturdy pifion pine is there, its 

64 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 65 

twisted trunk and writhing arms seeming to tell 
a tale of stress and storm and agony, and yet 
that cannot be since it was born misshapen, and 
the fierceh' sweeping desert winds had naught to 
do with its deformities, for close beside it stands 
a straight-stemmed, long-leaved pine, full 
grown, but only sapling high, whose slender 
straightness and whose graceful branching 
those winds have failed to mar. There grows 
the mountain mahogany with its rich wine-red 
heart. And under foot, round cactus balls 
looking like porcupines on guard, their lovely 
delicate pink blooms rivaling the rose. There, 
too, the greasewood flourishes, man-high, with 
feathery foliage of a cedar green, whose 
branches furnish fuel for the desert bred, and 
hiss and sputter like burning grease when they 
are set aflame. There are tiny tufts of bunch- 
grass and high clumps of desert weeds. 

And there's the sage, the noble desert sage 
of purple, green, and gray. Where water 
comes seldom, or never, it sturdily flings its 
branches out, and is as much of the desert a 
part, as its sun, or its sands, or its burned-out 
rock. At dawn the bronco's parched throat is 
wet by the moisture that stands on its pale green 
leaves ; at evening its branches help to heat 
his rider's bacon and sour dough, and, standing 
as high as a mounted man, it w^ll afford life- 
giving shade where other shade is none. But 
more than that, the sage does double service to 



66 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

the eye, for it breaks the stretch of blazing 
light with darker spots of a restful hue, and 
when the sun is sinking beneath the desert's 
far, straight rim, sending long shafts of mel- 
low fire to touch the rounded bodies of the sage 
with the light of pure enchantment, it is then 
they glow like balls of sunny light above the 
darkening desert floor that already has grown 
shadowed, for in that eerie, brooding hush the 
burning blaze of day relents and sends forth 
farewell glances of softest, kindly gold. Brave 
growth that looks the fierce sun in the eye and 
stands up proudly where all else would perish or 
live a meager, cowering life beneath his buridng 
glance ! 

But that's in the flat desert. In my canon 
garden the sage communes with goodly com- 
pany, and holds high wassail when the winter 
rains pour rushing torrents down the canon 
beds. For the Desert Gardener lets his garden 
go a long, long time unwatered, then, like a boy 
with a new watering-can. He'll sometimes drown 
His thirsty garden out. 

The lizards flash in that garden green and 
gray — that buried garden, that sunken gar- 
den, all walled about with high bare slopes — 
and the sun is hot, though the air is soft and 
very, very still. There are no birds in that 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 67 

garden, though the hawk and his buzzard cousin 
fix their bright eyes upon it from the blue sky 
above. Even the insects dwell not there ; no 
busy whirr is ever heard, no cheerful hum, no 
chirr, nor scrape of wing. 

But every spot upon this earth holds some 
especial gift, and in my desert garden there 
dwells, not deathlike stillness, but the stillness 
of a world unborn. There dwells profoundest 
peace. 



SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

Man has come and man has gone and he has 
left this land more desolate than when God 
made it at the first. A shaly road winds into 
the brooding shadows of a deep-cleft canon. 
As nature fashioned it, it would be grim, but 
man has made it tragic, for upon one side of 
that rough trail an old adobe arrastre still 
prevails o'er desert sun and fierce cloudburst 
and swift and sudden slides of rock from the 
steep walls above. Across from the old ar- 
rastre, perched upon its little dump, stands a 
miner's roofless hut of stone, brush covering the 
floor. Still farther on, is a wide, deep hole, its 
nearer edge brushing the very trail — that hole 
was dug to drink from, and beneath its shallow 
depth of poison water lies a human skeleton. 
Then out through the canon's upper end, 
spreads a brushy, rock-strewn flat where only 
an old slag dump betrays the life of a former 
day. The flat backs up against a steep gray 
wall, two tunnel mouths like eye sockets glaring 
from out its face of rough, gray stone. Na- 
ture, where man has never pitched his tent, is 
wild and awesome, sometimes grim and cruel, 
and sometimes sad and tragic, but there is no 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 69 

sadness in her face, there is no tragedy H^c to 
that she shows on her broad countenance where 
man has struggled and failed and died, leaving 
his puny monuments behind. 

Then, leaving that gray, steep slope behind 
and taking the canon road down to the flat, one 
reads a different chapter in man's book of past 
endeavor, for here, no rough and dangerous 
steeps, but beneath a burning sun a rough road 
deep in sand that runs through little desert 
towns and out across wide sandy wastes. At 
one point on its way this road says Howdy to 
a big stone house, adjoining it, a large stone- 
walled corral. Before the house, an old well- 
hole, now half choked up and dry as desert dust. 
The ruined road house, the long corral wall 
are built of black volcanic rock, the burned-out 
malapai flung on the desert floor, long ages 
gone, by some then active crater miles away. 
Close to that ruined road house, silent now, 
where thirty years ago a hundred horses milled 
in its corral, there is a small round knoll, a little 
island in the desert sea, covered with sage-brush, 
with one big flat stone, a deep hole in its center 
where the squaws were wont for ages past to 
grind their meal, using a smooth and oblong 
stone for pestle, and, indeed, they camp there 
yet, whenever their wandering fortunes bring 
them near. 

If man's struggles and ruined monuments do 



70 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 



bring but sadness to wild nature's face, his top- 
most art in dress grafted upon her rough- 
clothed native race were enough to make her 
rugged face crack into a grim smile. I was 
lost one day in a wild and gloomy canon lighted 
by sunshine only at high noon. 'Twas here 
thought I, the very earth was made rough hewn 
nor has been ever polished since, when looking 
up its bed I saw three Indians riding down 
The rear was brought up by a half grown boy 
In the center rode a fat, old squaw dressed in a 
bright print gown, while in the lead, a small 
old Indian, his deep brown leathery face 
wrinkled and cross-wrinkled by age and daz- 
zling sun, beamed genially at me from beneath 
the brim of a high-crowned old plug hat which 
he wore with conscious pride and dignity as 
though it were fitter than his old war-bonnet. 



IGNORANCE 

Far in the desert shines a golden glory. On 
one side, looking close, but miles from it, rise 
lofty mountains, gray, implacable, and bare 
unto their summits, save for snow that caps 
them ever, and on beyond that misty sun-shot 
nimbus, the desert, silent, brush-strewn, vast. 

Across the desert from those gray rock walls, 
but at its upper end, far from that golden glory, 
rise other mountains, copper-purple, black, 
slashed with deep canons widening to a flat that 
slopes to the desert bed. The only roads into 
those black, rough hills run up the canon 
slashes. My old cow-pony picks his careful 
way down this kind nature's roadway, for even 
in the desert is she kind, at times, if one but give 
her smile for smile. Her smile is always bril- 
liant. When the canon walls fan out to left 
and right, giving a wide look down that sandy 
waste, my golden glory's there. 'Tis not the 
sun gilding a certain spot through rifted, pur- 
ple clouds. It looks to my pleased eyes more 
like a sunny fire, its licking flames softened by 
mists of distance to one bright golden glow, a 
delicate mist like sun smoke all around it. The 
rocks about are somber, the sky is gray or pur- 

71 



72 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

pie-dark — yet there it shines, my fairy fire. 

I do not know what causes it — I do not 
want to know. The names of flowers give no 
added pleasure in their beauty, nor why they 
grow, nor Jiow, could add to my delight. I am 
quite sure that science could not aid me with a 
long, learned explanation of it, and if it could I 
should not thank it much, for as it is I love 
that fairy fire, a sunny spot in a wide burned-up 
flat. It glows less golden in the golden sun, 
just as a bonfire pales at broad midday. So 
when I ride out from the canon's shadow and see 
that sun-dust in a blank, still world, my spirit 
lifts, my pony pricks his ears and steps more 
lightly. The very smell of sand he loves, of 
course, yet I know not but he has had instilled 
into his wise old head some of his master's fancy. 

There are some men who will account for al- 
most everything upon this big, strange earth. 
But did you ever think how dreadful it would be 
to know it all? To trace earth's mighty layers, 
through all the countless ages, to her very 
heart? To hear the tongue of prehistoric man, 
or, possibly, his jabber? Or yet, still further 
back, to know and see reptilian life acrawl in 
fetid slime? Or, pray, would you wish to see 
and know those creatures back at the beginning 
when this world was formed from — what? 
When all's explained and all's experienced, life 
is a finished book, no romance left, delight, nor 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 73 

hidden joy. No, give me my sunny fire in the 
desert, nor tell me whence it came. Oh, Thou 
Great Universe, I beg of Thee, yield not too 
many secrets unto me, nor make me overwise, for 
then should I be sad forevermore. 



PATIENCE 

A wide and lonely flat that to the eye looks 
limitless. Though to that eye it seems to 
stretch unbroken to the line where earth meets 
heaven, yet is it seamed and gashed with fluted 
hollows, draws, arroyos, hid from the glance 
that cuts across their edges to the clear horizon 
far away, as a pebble skips the crests of dancing 
waves, nor takes account of wave-troughs in be- 
tween. The western sky is filled with rosy 
clouds merged to a flaming yellow where it 
meets the distant earth, that shows up black 
and sinister against that yellow glow. No hills 
loom up athwart that far, free view ; no water's 
there ; no growth of grass, no tree ; nothing but 
earth and sky and stilly promise of the coming 
night. Over the sage-brush, greasewood, cac- 
tus spires, there hangs the last light of the dy- 
ing sun, transparent, tarnished gold. On the 
black earth, that water's vital kiss would cause 
to blush and blossom into beauty, crawls the 
snake, while up from the nearest ridgy hollow, 
out on to the flat, a big, lean steer with droop- 
ing head weaves slowly, painfully, while on his 
sunken, bony back a buzzard calmly rides. 

Days ere the cattleman's keen eye had known 

74 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 75 

his animal was doomed, the buzzard's instinct 
sensed the truth; tliereafter left liiiii never, but, 
perched upon the steer's ridged spine or on a 
jutting, bony liip, with folded wings is waiting. 
The dying beast, too sick to heed, too weak to 
make protest, finally stumbles to his knees, then 
plows the black earth with his nose, and with a 
low moan settles down to lie supine, but with 
erected horns. The buzzard, biding his time to 
strike, moves forward, perching carefully upon 
one long sharp horn. Then from the sky, now 
turned to palest green, comes circling down from 
some mysterious height the big bird's mate, 
lighting with swift, sure drop upon the other 
horn. 

No move they make. With folded wrings at 
rest they watch the big, gaunt steer breathe out 
his life, but perched upon his wide-spread curv- 
ing horns, they're waiting, waiting, waiting. 



THROUGH A WINDOW 

From the high peaks the soft white flakes are 
driving, and though I am standing ankle-deep 
in snow, from far below smiles up at me the 
silent, yellow desert, shining with alluring 
golden light, and ringed about my darkly storm- 
ing mountains, it lies, a sunny circle, on its 
flat floor far below, as the sun shines through a 
knot-hole in a darkened room and paints a 
golden disk upon its shadowed floor. It is like 
looking from the outer cold and darkness 
through a window into warmth and cheery light. 

And though it beckons warmly with its still 
and distance radiance, holding out fair promise 
and vivid, bright allure, like many a golden 
vision, looking lovely from far heights, when I 
draw near with out-stretched hand, it scorches, 
burns, and sears. 



76 



VARIETY 

Old Nature is a conjuror and delights in 
playing tricks. She loves to bring out colors 
that we didn't know she had, like a mother draw- 
ing treasure from an unguessed secret pocket to 
delight her children's eyes. 

There is a red, red road I know that runs 
between tall, close grown pines, their dark green 
boughs its canopy. When I emerge at sunset 
from that cool and fragrant tunnel, its floor 
slashed with long bars of sunny light, I know 
not what the distant view will give, for it is ever 
new. I have seen from near that tunnel's mouth 
the distant mountains all a mass of golden rose, 
no hint of colors of an hour gone ; and I have 
seen those hills a mass of varied shades, from 
deepest green of nearest crests, to purple, blue, 
then blue-gray, till the country over there is 
melted with the sky ; and then, again, it is a 
sea of sage-green billows, with red and yellow 
gashes running from their topmost crests, a 
brilliant sky above ; and yet again, ridge after 
ridge of those same hills is buried clean in snowy 
white, a cold blue flawless sky above. I never 
know how those far hills will greet me, nor what 
appeal their changeful moods may make. 

77 



78 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

The desert, too, with its cyclopean mountains 
is wrapped at dawn and evening in soft veils of 
mystery. Those jagged peaks and ridges that 
in the clear, hot light of desert day are sternly 
stamped against a burning sky, at dawn are 
changed to misty, gracious lines of purple 
beauty edged with rose, and then they seem to 
hold an unnamable promise and a bright allure. 
At dusk they show blue-black with a still air of 
brooding mystery. Their lines are softened, as 
at dawn, but now they loom as somber shadows 
of the great unknown, nor do they urge and 
beckon as in the waking day. 

And there is a desert Will-o'-the-Wisp that 
flashes in the pearl-gray dawn and in the velvet 
blackness of the night, upon the desert floor. 
It is the light of Ah Hee's fire, that cooks us 
at dawn the far-brought and often the far-flung 
egg, and at evening the " T bone " steak. 



FRIENDS OF MINE 



THE FORTY-NINESS 

Hemming the desert on the west there rises a 
huge rampart, gray and cold, that hides from 
desert e^'es the gentler, grassy, tree-clad hills 
where the placer country lies. And to that 
placer country came tlie Argonauts in 1849. 

She was tall for a girl and, though slender, 
gave promise of future roundness. Her mouth 
was rather wide and humorous, her color bril- 
liant, her hair blue-black, and her eyes were vio- 
let, but laughing. I don't know why, but I 
always associate violet eyes with seriousness. 
Hers, however, were like violets that held the 
reflected sunlight of the sky above them. And 
then she had dimples. I mention them because, 
perhaps, they helped her through it all. And 
I mention her first because she counted — and 
counts — the most, but there was, also, her hus- 
band. She was only eighteen and he was three 
years older — the correct Victorian ages for 
marrying, I believe, though they had been mar- 
ried a year. He was a nice boy with kind, 
brown eyes, and just after the '49 excitement 
he w^ent West and she would not be left behind. 
They both hailed from a birthplace of sail- 
ors, therefore it was a trip around Cape Horn 

81 



S2 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

and so up the western coast to the Golden Gate 
and then, as quickly as could be, to the nearest 
land of promise. 

That nearest land of promise was a pine clad 
mountain land where the snow lay deep in the 
winter, where the gulches roared with the rains, 
yet over the lofty mountains to the east there 
lay a hot and glittering yellow waste where all 
the gold was sand. No eastern miners came 
there until later to search its bordering hills for 
gold, for it looked, and was, a grim, forbidding 
land. 

She lived in a canvas house, this gently bred 
eastern girl. She could see the tarantulas 
crawling on the walls, she learned to keep a 
sharp eye abroad for rattlers, she found that 
the Digger Indians were cowards, for she drove 
away twenty of them with an empty forty-five, 
and in that little canvas shack she gave birth 
to her two girls, with no woman near, no doctor. 
There were floods one winter in that valley where 
her big brown-eyed hunter sluiced the golden 
sands, and he rescued a Chinaman from being 
swept away, one day, but the drenching he got 
killed him — the Chinaman survived. 

So Sally Everett was left in a narrow gulch 
beside a rapid mountain river, where the sloping 
canon walls ran steeply up, where the shadows 
left late in the day and came back again early. 
There was a little flat beside the stream where 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 83 

her small canvas house stood with some others — 
and that was all. No, not quite all, for moun- 
tain lions and wildcats came to the edge of the 
timber, deer and bears sometimes crossed the 
flat, the birds sang at her, the little singing 
stream made music, and she had the worshipful 
devotion of every man in camp, and while dress 
was rough and life simple, the earliest camps 
brought into their circle the brains, the educa- 
tion, and the fine manliness of their day. 

But the two little girls were growing bigger 
and so she must go back — across the Isthmus 
this time — for school is the rod of a tyrant to a 
dutiful mother. Whither that beckons she must 
follow. When she reached home, the little buck- 
skin sack, filled with gold-dust when she left the 
camp, was almost empty of the coins for which 
she had exchanged it. Her family was poor. 
She would not be a burden to them, and those 
little mouths must be fed, so she went to work. 
A second time she loved and married, and then 
her young soldier husband answered that first 
stern call for volunteers in the days of '61, even 
as the other had responded to the mad call of 
gold. So he went, and had his fortunes all to 
make when he came back. Then followed years 
of pinching and privation, and other children 
came to be a worry and a comfort, also a gen- 
erous spur to new endeavor. Her brood grew 
up and scattered to the four corners of this 



84 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

stronger, greater America. To the scenes of 
her early life of hardship one son has returned, 
equipped with all the knowledge that modern 
science gives, with machinery and money to 
trace the source of that old golden flood. His 
wife he leaves behind, for despite the sixty odd 
years gone, the living's still too primitive, the 
country is too rough. 

When Sally Everett speaks of '49 there's a 
sparkle in her bright old eyes : and when she 
hears the martial music of the tense days of '61 
the color flames in her still smooth cheeks and 
those violet eyes are suff'used with unshed tears. 
The strong and valiant spirit of the Forty- 
niner's wife still looks from her eyes — and life 
is good and there remains much gold to find. 
And so she smiles. For she still has those 
dimples. 



A MISSOURI MEERSCHAUM 

I sing not the song of the cigarette nor the 
fragrant Cuban leaf, but the song of the ]\Iis- 
souri Meerschaum, — the good old corn-cob 
pipe. 

In a land where distance is measured by the 
time it takes to consume " six cigareets an' a 
couple o' quids," tobacco is surely King. If the 
cigarette is the populace, the cigar the haute 
noblesse, then the old Missouri Meerschaum is 
guide, counselor, and friend. Its long thin stem 
tells a dreamy tale of brooding, reedy marshes 
where wide sheets of quiet water lie in unruffled 
sleep, and its bowl recalls fair memories of the 
land where the sweet corn grows. 

The cigarette is a dainty thing, but it reaches 
and twists the nerves ; the cigar is a delicate lux- 
ury that doesn't grow in the wilds ; and the quid 
— well, as Lincoln said on a time when speaking 
of something else, " For people who like that 
sort of a thing, that's the sort of thing they'd 
like." Though I know many men enjoy the 
quid, and some of my good friends chew, yet I'm 
sure that the quid doesn't comfort them as my 
warm old friend does me. I tell it my troubles 

and my joys, it stays with me day and night, 

85 



86 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

and the visions I see in its curling smoke are 
good and passing fair, and I am the peer of 
any one when talking to my pipe. 

With many strange moods it has sympa- 
thized, it has steadied me, betimes, and has 
burned itself to its very heart to give me of its 
best, and every time that my mood lights up, it 
responds with a steady glow, burning fragrant 
incense to its loyalty to me, not with the scented, 
dizzying black perique from the Orient, nor yet 
the leaf from Connecticut, nor that from the 
Philippine Islands, but with the fragrant 
steadiness of good Virginia plug. 

When the night shuts down, when shades are 
drawn and the lamp of evening lit, thoughts 
kindly, weird, elusive, bright, arise with the curl- 
ing smoke, and in its blue wreaths crystallize the 
ideas born of day. A non-smoker has prophe- 
sied that in some awful years, a smoker will be 
a Pariah, a hermit shunned and scorned and 
forced to live far from his kind, whom the fumes 
of his pipe can never reach. Now be that day 
far distant, long after my day is sped, though 
I know a place far, far from men in a clean and 
empty desert land, where with my corn-cob pipe 
alight and atop a lonely mountain peak, I may 
play volcano to desire's topmost bent. 

When, after my life's day has closed, I go still 
further up, I pray I may be segregated on some 
lonely cloud and permitted to smoke my pipe in 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 87 

peace, so tliat I promise solemnly to let no blue 
smoke cloud a})proach the ladies' filmy drap- 
eries upon adjoining clouds. But if, alas! my 
future life is planned for down below, the to- 
bacco there would be too dry to smoke with any 
zest, and then, besides and even worse, the fumes 
of sulphur always spoil the flavor of a pipe. 
That xvould be Hell. 



PINON 

He was one of Nevada's Native Sons. His 
sire was as black as night and large for a desert 
horse, and his proud neck had never been caught 
in the cowboy's circling rope. His mother was 
a blooded bay, and brought to his fiery desert 
blood the breeding of the East. She had been 
lured away from a rancher's field by that lordly 
desert chief, and no art could tole her home 
again, for the Arab in her blood responded to 
the desert's call — and she knew the ways of 
men. And so when the herd went into the hills 
when the grass began to spring, her colt was 
born upon a flat and grassy mountain bench, 
and not in the sheltered stable where she had 
spent her youth. 

And so he ran with his mother, and so he grew 

in strength. He learned to step over shelving 

rock without slipping a quarter inch, he learned 

to avoid the poison springs, and where sweet 

water ran, and he learned to drink all he could 

hold when he came to a water hole. He learned 

to run from a loud sharp sound that came from 

the back of a distant horse who would not join 

his herd, for following one such loud report he 

saw a playfellow stumble, fall, and never rise 

88 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 89 

again. He learned to swerve from a rattler's 
coil as swift as a flash of light, but most of all, 
he learned to flee from a strange shape with a 
rope that followed him fast and followed him 
far, and though ever he got away, from behind 
some boulder or rocky bend it would suddenly 
dash again, until one hot and fateful day, far 
from his usual range, a cool, dark canon drew 
him on until he found himself in a box, all 
smooth, sheer walls ahead. Then turning 
around with a startled snort, sensing his human 
foe, he looked down the steep-w^alled canon bed 
up which he had lightly stepped, and saw three 
shapes against the light, and each shape had a 
rope. His satin skin was quivering and his nos- 
trils panting wide, but he stood backed up 
against the wall and glared with laid back ears. 

Three circling swift ropes caught him, and 
then he reared with an angry scream, and then 
he w^ent to his knees — another ^^oung, wald, free 
thing was caught to be the slave of man. But 
I wonder if he counted and treasured up his re- 
venge? For before he could be trusted, he had 
killed exactly three of those hated shapes with 
long coiled ropes who had ridden him at the 
first. 

He was not very large, nor very small, but 
w^ould dance w^ith two hundred pounds, w^ith a 
big, round barrel and short, flat back and a tail 
that swept the ground, and his color between the 



90 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

black and red of his sire and his dam. His flat 
knees tapered to rounded hoofs, but his beauty 
was his head; wide, showing brain, between the 
eyes, with Httle pointed ears that never in all 
his life laid flat after he'd killed those three, and 
a large, full sparkling eye that would see a fly 
light on his back as quick as it would the road 
ahead. 

He had ridden range in Nevada one hundred 
miles to the day ; he had trailed a lady's skirts 
on his back and carried her safe and well; he 
had been a desert packer's mount and captained 
a string of mules ; he had snaked mine timbers 
where wheels could not go, and worked on a 
miner's whim; yet today, at the age of twenty- 
five, he will climb in one hour a steep rough trail 
that another horse climbs in two. A bronco is 
not a jumping horse — from his sires he may 
have learned that landing all fours on a heap 
of rocks is not good for the desert-bred. So 
he slides down the side of a gully, or wash, and 
climbs up the further side, or takes one long, 
slow step across, if the gully be not too wide ; 
but when Pinon comes to a gully he clears it, 
light as a bird, and shakes his handsome head 
when he alights, as I've seen a hunter do. 

Now here is the strangest thing of all when 
you recall his youth, for when you head him 
for the herd, his tail plumes out and his head 
goes up and his ears point straight ahead, his 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 91 

eyes are bright and he wliccls like light, and 
works without rein or spur; for the keenest joy 
in life he knows is when he bears you upon his 
back to help you corral his kind. 



FOR SHERIFF 

The summer was at its height. The pri- 
maries were to be held the latter part of August 
and the fight for the election of a new sheriff 
was waxing hot. From a monetary standpoint 
it was the most desirable elective office to be 
contested, since the salary was big for the 
desert, the perquisites considerable, the work 
light, as the country was at peace. Only once 
in a great while was the sheriff called upon to 
chase a horse thief, his duties being largely 
those of an undertaker presiding over the fu- 
neral obsequies of defunct mines ; but when he 
wus called upon to fulfil the strenuous duties of 
his office, the trail would take him over wild and 
gloomy spaces and sometimes across the deserts 
of another state. But this was seldom. 

In the space of a few short days I was more 
visited by would-be county officials than in years 
before. Down the desert they rode from the 
county town, up through the rough, wild coun- 
try bordering those level sands, scouring the 
flats, the canons, the ridges to find, interview, 
persuade, the desert rancher and the lone miner, 
a visit to whose shacks might entail a deviation 

of many miles from the main traveled road, for 

92 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUXSETS GO 93 

in this desert land every vote would count. 
They visited every big and little mine in the 
hope of swaying the boss by specious promises, 
and his men by genial talk and big cigars. My 
own little mine was high on a steep, rocky slope, 
miles above the desert, but there I met them all. 
Ranchers and miners they were, some of them 
men who had held petty office, and they mounted 
the steep and winding caiion road to the ledge 
where the office and bunkliouse stood, their lean 
and rangy desert horses hardly puffing after the 
eight mile uphill climb. 

The first to honor me was Jim Lorgan. His 
lips dripped civic virtue, but his mustache was 
long and drooping, the kind that seems to sug- 
gest an alcohol-dipped brush. After proffering 
the inevitable, the electoral cigar, Jim held forth 
upon the subject of his visit. 

" I'm a runnin' fer sheriff o' this here county, 
an' there's five o' us in the race, so it'll be some 
fight, fer bootleggin' is goin' ter be a strong 
issue. Now, I ain't aimin' ter say nothin' agin 
any other candidate, fer that ain't the way ter 
win, by knockin' the other feller, an' I don't in- 
tend ter bring no personal things into this here 
campaign. Shelton Corliss, him as is Sheriff 
now, is in the race agin, he's one o' us five. 1 
ain't got nothin' agin' Shelton. He's a pretty 
good feller, though some do say that he'd orter 
had Tom Halliday arrested fer bootleggin', even 



94 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

if Tom did marry Corliss's sister, fer everybody 
knows that you could go into Tom's Hotel on 
the aidge o' the desert at Sandy ville and get a 
shot o' hooch any time, an' Corliss's brother 
helpin' Tom about the Hotel as handy man, with 
a whiskey nose on him the color o' a desert 
geranium. But, as I say, Shelton's all right, 
an' I ain't agoin' ter knock. I believe in iivin' 
by the law, an' I'm goin' ter enforce it if I'm 
'lected." 

After much more of the same in praise of 
the other four, Lorgan left. Corliss must have 
been on his trail for it was only a couple of 
hours later that the Sheriff turned into my 
mine trail. Six feet four he stood, and all in 
proportion to his inches, with a massive featured 
face smooth shaven, a wide brimmed pearl-gray 
Stetson shading his big close-cropped head, 
coatless, his vest hanging open, and blue-over- 
alled. 

" I haven't met you, but I heard o' you, and 
I've come ter ask you ter vote for my reelection 
at the primaries. I'm aimin' ter keep personali- 
ties out o' my fight for Sheriff. Course, I know 
I got enemies, but I don't want ter get elected 
again by throwin' any slurs at anybody. But, 
now, there's Jim Lorgan. He was my deputy 
for awhile, and now he's runnin' against me. 
Jim's not such a bad feller, but in this dry dis- 
trict, Jim run a bootleg joint when he was 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUXSETS GO 95 

deputy sheriff, and they do say tliat he punishes 
a good deal of his own bootleg." 

While I had him there, I meant to find out the 
story from his own lips, a story reciting that 
Corliss had taken advantage of his position as 
sheriff to assault outrageously a local store- 
keeper about half his size. 

" It ain't an}^ such thing as that report says, 
fer Bill Robinson and I have always been good 
friends. We was doin' some business together 
and there was some dispute between us about 
the money settlement o' that same business. I 
was in Bill's one day, when he got some abusive, 
claimin' I hadn't handed over all the cash due 
him on the deal. I w^asn't sayin' much, when 
Bill come up close ter me, still talkin' wild, and 
actin' like he w^as goin' ter land on me. It was 
in his store, and we w^as both in back near the 
safe, and I just put up my hand — it was flat 
open — and pushed his face away. I was some 
surprised when he w^ent dow^n all in a heap, and 
I ain't seen him since. I heard that he was in 
bed four days, and went around his store with 
his head all bandaged up fer two weeks, but I 
don't see how^ one push could 'adone that. And 
I don't most usually carry any gun, neither, 
and hadn't one on then. 

" Now, this question o' bootleggin' is a big 
issue in this campaign, and if I'm elected, I in- 
tend ter enforce the law, as I have been doin', no 



96 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

matter mho is guilty. Yes, even if it was my 
own brother doin' it, I'd haul him over the 
coals." 

He left, riding on to a bigger camp beyond, 
and the next morning, Sam Applegate said, 
" Howdy," tied his horse to a ring set in the 
corner of my bunkhouse, seated himself on the 
long bench before the door, and opened fire. 

" Reckon you've been pestered some these days 
by want-to-be sheriffs? Well, here's another 
one. I ain't never done nothin' in politics, me 
bein' a rancher, but I hold that it's a office that 
hadn't orter have nothin' to do with politics, an' 
this bootleggin's got ter stop. There's a lot o' 
talk goin' back and forth among the candidates, 
some knockin', I tell 2/0%, but I ain't indulgin' in 
none. Shelton Corliss is a good feller, but he's 
held the job three terms, and that orter be 
enough, besides, though I won't say his brother's 
a bootlegger, he hangs 'round awful close ter 
a feller what is, helps him in fact. Don't you 
guess the sheriff is onto that? You betcher! 
Jim Lorgan, now, he's all right, but he don't 
make no bones about biddin' for the bootleg 
vote, an' them bootleggers knows they can keep 
up their trade if he gits in — Jim's a good feller, 
though — but / ain't tyin' myself up by beggin' 
them cusses ter vote fer me. No, Sir — " 

His talk was interrupted by the sight of a 
new arrival, riding along the ore road towards 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 97 

the buiikliousc, and there was a stiff, strained 
silence as the newcomer ahghted. Applegate 
reckoned he'd be " pulHn' his freight," as he had 
a long ride ahead of him. but he'd see me again 
on his way back. 

The new arrival was short and stout, and 
wore canvas leggings over good store trousers. 
He was spectacled and his head showed slightly 
bald when he took off his stiff straw hat to mop 
his forehead. 

" Whew, that's some climb ! My name's 
Hiram Brown, and I'm running for sheriff 
against this bunch of Desert Rats. It's a bus- 
iness proposition and should be handled in a 
business way. There should be no mutual re- 
criminations in a political campaign. Bootleg- 
ging in this county has become a curse and I 
pledge m}^ word to put it out of business if you 
give me your vote at the primaries, and I'm 
elected. My opponents don't like me because 
they know I know 'em," and his small black eyes, 
pinched curved nose, and hard mouth gave him 
the look of a bird of prey as he got out this 
speech. 

I had heard of Hi Brown. He owned stores 
in different towns in the county and he used in- 
decent haste and took much pleasure in annex- 
ing claims and ranches for any little bill that 
could not be paid on the dot. The reason for 
such failure to pay mattered not to Hiram. I 



98 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

happened to know that he sold certain liquids 
and fiery extracts in large quantities to known 
bootleggers on the quiet, nor was he over curi- 
ous about the reason for such large purchases of 
those fiery liquids so long as he got a stiff cash 
price for them. In a " dry " country, a con- 
scientious storekeeper refuses to sell such sup- 
plies when he has reason to suspect that they 
are being put to illicit use. Hiram left as 
briskly as he came, saying as he got quickly 
into his saddle, 

" I'll hope for your vote at the primaries, Sir. 
This county needs to be cleaned up and I have 
certain means that I can bring to bear to run it 
right." 

He climbed to his saddle as he'd climb a tree, 
nor mounted with the cowboy's easy swing, then 
rode on like a sack of meal, but busily. 

The fifth aspirant was yet to call on me, and 
I looked for his coming with interest for I'd 
heard much of him. Next morning, when the 
desert lay below all bathed in early sunshine, 
when the purple canon shadows were changing 
to their daytime hues of gray -green brush and 
brownish porphyry, a big, but dainty stepping 
desert horse turned from the wagon road into 
the trail that led up to my shack, where he 
halted dead at a gentle pull on the heavy Span- 
ish bit. His rider dismounted with a swing that 
was all spring and strength. Pulling the reins 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 99 

over his horse's licad, ho tied liini to the ground, 
then paused for a moment beside him to stroke 
the powerful, arching- neck, to stroke the fore- 
head between two eyes that were wide and full 
and bright. After a final pat and a low-toned 
word, he turned with his hand outstretched. A 
tall, lean frame that showed strength and grace 
was his, and a lean, tanned face, gray eyes that 
held a whimsical light, a good square chin, and 
a laughing mouth that was swept by a light 
mustache. He was clad in conventional desert 
dress : blue overalls over heavy boots high heeled 
and heavil^^ spurred and an open throated flan- 
nel shirt beneath an unbuttoned vest. Those 
vests ! They are ahvays open, but worn on the 
hottest days, and are as much of a horseman's 
dress in the desert as his hat. They hold his 
cigareet papers, his matches, tobacco, pipe, and 
perhaps that's why they are so loved. 

" Howdy, Friend," he drawled to me, in a 
pleasant boyish voice. " I reckon you're filled 
up with sheriff's, but I'm out to play the game 
with the rest. My name is Archie Hamilton, 
an' my friends just made me run. I never 
ain't did no politics, but I reckon I could try, 
an' I know the country from A to Z, an' all 
the bad hombres, too." Then with a whimsical 
smile he added, as he looked at me. " Maybe 
that ain't no recommend. 

" They're makin' bootleg the slogan, an' o' 



100 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

course that there's O. K., but Hell! we've all 
made it or drunk the stuff or winked at them as 
did, an' I been no better than all the rest, but, 
friend, I'll tell jou this," and his laughing eyes 
were serious now, with a deep and earnest glow, 
" I got a young wife an' a little kid, an' I prom- 
ised Jean when I married her that I would cut 
out the booze, an' I ain't had a shot o' hooch 
since then, though I was a Hellion once. You 
don't know me, so I tell you this to let you know 
that what I promise, I aim to do, an' if I am 
elected to this here job an' take the oath as 
sheriff — well, I ain't never broke my word." 

He didn't offer me a cigar — for that he had 
my silent thanks — but sat on the bench beside 
my door, looking musingly down over canon 
walls to the yellow desert far below. 

" Say, Pard, you're clost to Heaven here. 
Ain't this one o' God's own days ! " Then with 
a self-amused chuckle at his own seriousness, 
" My rivals all got the start o' me an' I got a 
great big job ahead, so I reckon I'll hit the 
trail. I hope our trails will cross in town, an' 
whether I'm sheriff or punchin' cows, I'll sure be 
glad to see you there." 

With a firm handclasp and adios he was in 
his saddle and up the trail, riding along at a 
shuffling j og, rolling a cigareet. 

And I knew where my vote would go. 



THAT COUNTRY OVER THERE 

A mauve colored burro in a purple canon 
whose steep wall spires are tipped with fire, 
piercing the pearl and gray of dawn. The 
burro was driven up the canon road by a man 
not old, but bent, yet his step was springy, his 
air was free, and his glance was searching, keen, 
from a pair of steady, clear gray eyes that 
noted everything. His overalls were blue can- 
vas, light blue his summer shirt, and he fitted 
into the landscape as much as the joshua-trees, 
even his light gray Stetson lent a harmonious 
note. His burro was laden with two months' 
grub and cooking and mining tools. He had 
but a dollar to his name, but that was more 
than he could use, for he was bound for a place 
where the coin of man will not buy anything. 
He was somewhat of a carpenter, and a black- 
smith for all his needs, and he carried spare 
shoes for his burro, which he knew how to fix 
himself, a cook was he of the very best, and a 
pretty good laundryman, a seamster, too, 
though his sewing ran more to strength than 
delicacy. In the dark of the morning, at three 

o'clock, at the town on the desert's edge, he had 

101 



102 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

eaten his bacon and sour dough, for he must 
be up in the hills before the desert wakes to 
heat. 

Of all the men our country breeds, the pros- 
pector is best trained for domestic life, yet the 
thing which forced that training is the thing 
which makes him homeless — the thought that 
he'll yet make his stake in that country over 
there. Then the lure of the desert gets into 
his blood and the waste places swallow him. 

There's a little town of a hundred souls set 
down in a sandy flat, its houses little plain 
board shacks, with a small hotel and a big 
freight shed and a gambling hall, of course. 
And that is all, for the sandy wastes hem it in 
on every side, with ramparts of barren hills 
beyond, their high buttes topped with snow. 
When the stark and deadly loneliness gets on 
their burning nerves, they have sweet dreams, 
these wanderers, of trees and gurgling brooks. 
Then they hie them forth to greener scenes, and 
leave the little town, saying they've had enough 
of it and are never coming back, yet they come 
and come and come again. " The desert's got 
'em," is what we say, yet one cannot define its 
charm. There it lies sleeping its hot, still 
sleep, but very much alive. 

Love of gold.f^ 'Tis the joy of finding it and 
of seeing a camp of thousands grow where he 
first struck his pick, for the prospector is really 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 103 

a pioneer. He takes the trail ahead of the 
great army of enterprise that will follow later 
on, and, like all army skirmishers, he draws no 
general's pay. And the glory when he strikes it 
rich in some wild, unheard-of spot ! To pass 
through a crowded, big saloon, and at tables 
and at the bar to have men nod at him and say, 
" There goes the feller that made the strike that 
started the town o' Golden Spur." And it wor- 
ries liim not and he does not care — he feels, 
rather, a prideful glow — if in that same room, 
a few years later, he hears men whisper between 
their drinks, " There goes that feller that sold 
his claims in Golden Spur for a cool half mil- 
lion cash. He made things hum and in just 
two years he'd blown ever}^ damn cent in." 

But now he tramps up the canon road, on 
into the purple gloom. His heart and his feet 
and his purse are light, though he has ahead of 
him a journey that would daunt the heart of the 
stoutest city man, for if he grow ill or break a 
bone, he'll be thirty miles from aid, and will have 
to trust to the luck of the prospector to find 
water at his need. 

Where is he going? He knows not, quite, but 
desert miners in frequent gossips have told of 
districts here and there where he has never been, 
and in his dreams he sees a glowing prospect 
they've passed by. It matters not where his 
feet may lead him, so it be to a land that's new, 



104. THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

for ever his mind sees a golden promise in the 
country he has not seen. There's a misty cloud 
on the mountain ridge over which a new trail 
dips, in the shape of a beckoning finger, and his 
spirit obeys the call. So he talks to himself in 
a cheerful way and pulls hard on his pipe, for 
after brave dreams he is headed at last for that 
country over there. 



THE MINER 

His home is a one room canvas shack, its 
frame, tliin scantlings and small pine poles that 
sometimes break with the weight of snow upon 
its canvas roof. His stove is a flimsy sheet-iron 
affair, and he gathers his wood from day to day. 
His fuel is pinon pine and brush, for nothing 
but these and joshua-trees will grow on those 
steep rock slopes. For water to drink and for 
other use, he has none but melted snow which 
stays where it drifted, in a tunnel mouth, white 
and cold until late in July. That is his pre- 
cious reservoir, and he melts it at his need. His 
two burros scarce can keep the trail, so narrow 
and rough it is, but he drives them ten miles to 
the town once a month to stock up with beans, 
tobacco, coffee, flour, sugar, tea, and salt, then 
drives them home over dangerous trails some- 
times knee-deep in snow, and in places snow- 
slides have buried the trail from ten to twenty 
feet. He is tall and walks with a clumping 
tread from wearing hob-nailed boots. His 
wrist is leather-strapped from a break it sus- 
tained once in a mine. He is not old, he is not 
young, but his eye is blue and clear. The 

whole long year he digs alone and rarely sees 

105 



106 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

a soul. He wants no partner in his toil, for he 
knows there's a fortune in his claims if only the 
man with money will come to purchase at his 
price. 

Scarce wider than his burro's tread, the nar- 
row shelf in the mountain slope winds down to 
his lonely little house, and there it abruptly 
stops, for he lives at the end of the trail. The 
hills rise steeply all about the bowl where his 
cabin stands and patches of snow cling to them 
for eight months in the year. From the top of 
the trail above his shack, wild mountain ranges 
roll away till the haze of distance merges them 
with the far horizon's misted rim. His house 
stands at the bottom of a well of lofty hills, so 
the winds that forever tear across the ridges 
high above are never felt at the bottom of his 
well. And he is truth personified. 

It is a wild and lonely spot, so lonely and so 
wild it holds a secure sense of safe retreat, and 
he has grown to love it. He does not hate his 
kind, his hand is open, and his purse, to every 
man who needs. All the gossip of wild places he 
gives and takes at every cabin on his way from 
town. His mining is as primitive as in days 
long gone by, his tools, a single jack and hand- 
drill, his equipment, a windlass and a wooden 
bucket. Truly, the Forty-niner was hardly 
more the pioneer than he, for then men came in 
droves, and these, now lonesome, cold, and rocky 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 107 

liills were full of human life. But he lives all 
alone and with no more necessities than they, 
although his gun is of more modern pattern. 
He writes but rarely, reads the papers avidly, 
and devours the melodrama in cheap magazines. 
And he's a very child, but, also, he's a man. 



GOPHER HOLES 

So dark, so close, so very, very still ! — so 
dark a candle will but faintly light a tiny space ; 
so close the air, that candle can barely keep 
alight ; so still that all the vital energies athrob 
far, far above upon the busy earth, seem puny, 
meaningless, and matter not at all. For I am 
two hundred feet down under ground and a 
hundred feet away from the shaft, at the end 
of a narro\<^ drift, while all the earth above 
seems waiting to crush that tunnel in, and that 
flickering candle seems the only link with the life 
above. There's a long slim ladder, its narrow 
treads wire-nailed, to hold my weight — will 
they hold it safely, I wonder, until I reach the 
top.? In the roof of the old abandoned drift a 
mighty boulder, smooth and long, looks loose 
and about to fall — will it start when I pass 
under it and flatten me like a cake.? And the 
glug of a chunk of heavy quartz dropped into 
the black sump water has an ominous, threaten- 
ing sound, while boyhood tales of underground 
horrors flock to the memory. 

But that is all at the outset, for the old miner 

loves the earth's dark caves and is never so 

happy nor so much at home as when he is bur- 

108 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 109 

rowing underground on the trail of the hidden 
pocket. Yet take away the interest that lies in 
the game of hide-and-seek for gold, the glitter of 
achievement, the excitement of the chase, and 
earth's dark, threatening bosom would lure him 
with no magnet of attraction, for men are surely 
not by nature go])hcrs. They are not built that 
way, for proudly upheld heads and straight, 
upstanding spines were surely never given them 
to hold forever at a groveling angle. 

But ever will be some to whom the earth call 
is a strong command that may not be denied, 
and the old mine gopher was surely one of these, 
though he came not West in the beginning to 
delve in darkness deep in Mother Earth. His 
coming was the outgrowth of the yearning of 
the pioneer to blaze a trail where all was new 
and wild, and to reach back close to all those 
sincere things that still held the unspoiled fresh- 
ness of creation's dewy dawn. His very 
thoughts of the giant pines, of the wild, fierce 
beasts of prey, w^ere sweet imaginings to him 
wherein he pictured a clear, clean corner of 
Mother Nature's old cracked mirror, where she 
still could see her face, and so he came, too, with 
the spirit of the boy who longs to slip the lead- 
ing-strings of home, and pines to go adventur- 
ing. 

The quest of gold was but an excuse for his 
love of the primitive, for when he made a goodly 



110 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

strike, he went not back to an ordered life, but 
spent his stake with a largeness born of the 
open air, keeping only enough for a couple of 
burros and a prospector's kit. He never hears 
from his family and his kin he has forgot, for a 
shut-in life on an ordered scale would choke his 
desert breath. 

A bed for the night in a disused shack is all 
the home he craves, with his burros browsing 
among the cans on the dump outside its door, 
or singing their desert music while he talks to 
himself inside; or, if it be summer, he's well 
content to spread his blankets beneath the stars, 
with plenty of wood and water near. 

His brother is an eminent judge who knows 
not the feel of the desert wind, and the old mine 
gopher might have a home with him, but he 
prefers the sand for his bed and his burros for 
company. 

The man who sunk that mining shaft with 
its drifts and ladder and inky sump was such a 
miner, and when he struck rich ore in the shaft 
he sold the claim for a good round sum, and hit 
the trail with never a care till his money went 
and his grub gave out, then he dug again, in 
other men's mines, until he had saved a little 
stake. 

• • • • • • •- 

In the cool of a lovely desert dawn the sandy 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 111 

liuiiiinocks crowned with sage showed gray 
against a sky of pearl, and rounding a hummock 
ahead of me two little burros plodded near, 
herded along by a tall old man. His gray mus- 
tache swept his bronzed cheeks, his bright gray 
eyes were full of life, and he stepped like a boy 
on a camping trip. Those burros and their 
burdens were the whole of that little stake. 

" How^dy," he sang out to nie. " This coun- 
try's too plumb full o' holes. I heard of a 
country way up yonder where a feller's a chance 
ter make a stake, an' where he don't stand ter 
break a laig at every step in a gopher hole." 
With an adios he left me and I heard his bur- 
ros' tinkling bells long after they had dropped 
from sight beyond the big sand dunes. Our 
trails have never crossed since then, but I hope 
he has not had to dig in another man's gopher 
hole. 



LOST OPPORTUNITY 

I'm a sad old mule with long, long ears, 

An' I've said goodbye to my prime. 

When I think of the pullin', dusty years 

I reckon I've wasted time. 

I mind when my skinner bent his head 

To fix my heavy chain trace, 

I wish to cactus I'd kicked him dead, 

Planted my foot in his face. 

For after his blacksnake done its worst, 

He doubled a heavy chain 

An' flogged my back till it like to burst, 

Then cussed me again an' again. 

My nine big mates was willin' to pull, 

But on the wheel was I. 

I didn't budge, just stood like a fool, 

But the devil was in my eye. 

I didn't sing, but I like to died 

When that skinner sat on a rock and cried. 

They was tears o' rage, an' I knew his plight, 

For he'd lose his pay if he didn't make 

The ore train that left that night, — - 

Seven miles to the waitin' train 

Down a steep an' rocky road. 

I waited till all the light was gone. 

Then I started to pull the load. 

My mate on the wheel started up with me, 

112 



THE LAXD WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 113 

My mates ahead got into their collars, 
My skinner jumped off* his rock in glee, 
For he still might save his dollars. 
So he grabs up the reins, slams down his brake, 
An' we groaned an' creaked down the mountain 
side. 

We're a mile from the station when the train 

pulls out. 
An' the words of that skinner was balm to me. 
I couldn't make out what 'twas all about. 
But he raved at my hellish deviltry. 
All 'cause I paid him back for the pain 
He gave with that doubled iron chain. 
An' that is a sample of what I got 
When I helped haul loads over deserts hot. 
An' many a skinner has just missed death 
When he's beat me until he has lost his breath. 
Now I'm laid up here with a busted leg 
In a dusty, hot corral, 
To watch my fool kin draggin' by 
With droopin' head an' sleepy eye. 
I've heard, in the distant, busy city 
Even a mule they treat with pity. 
That they don't follow the Desert rule, 
" He ain't nothin' only a damn ole mule." 
O ten years in alfalfa I would give 
For one kick at the skinners that I've let live. 
So I'm wishin' for kicks that never will be 
An' regrettin' lost opportunity. 



M 



114 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 



PROSPECTIN' 

I'm off fer the hills 
On a fishin' trip, 
An' I've paid my bills. 
Now here's a tip — 

If I hear a lisp from the Will-o'-the-Wisp, 
That mean little devil, I'll sure get level, 
Fer I'm jist goin' fishin'. 
Adios ! 

If he shows his glim 
While I'm on my way 
I'll laugh at him, 
Fer I aim ter stay 
In a shady spot where it ain't so hot. 
An' where I'm told there ain't no gold, 
Fer I'm jist goin' fishin'. 
Adios! 

I'll lay in the shade 
Of a Cottonwood, 
Where game's a plenty 
An' fishin's good, 

Fer I aim ter sorter stick ter water, 
An' loaf an' rest like all possest, 
Fer I'm jist goin' fishin'. 
Adios ! 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 115 

Hello, Ole Timer ! 
I jist got back, 
An** nary a damn thing 
In my sack. 

Fishin'? Hell! I ain't had a smell 
O' fish or water, an' I jist orter 
A-gone a fishin'. 
Dammit ! 

On the aidge o' the Desert 
I struck some float. 
An' it looked so good 
That it got my goat. 
So I hunted round over miles o' ground 
Ter locate the ledge on the Desert's aidge| 
When I orter been fishin'. 
Dammit ! 

Now my grub is gone 
An' my hands is sore. 
My shoes is worn 
An' my pants is tore, 
My burro's sick an' I lost my pick. 
An' I ain't got a red ter feed my head, 
When I orter be eatin' fish. 
Dammit ! 

That float may a-rolled 
From the skinner's load. 



116 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

But it showed big gold 

Right by the road, 

An' I didn't know how fur I'd go, 

Fer the outcrop might pop inter sight 

Any minute, an' that beats fishin'. 



DRY COLORS 



AL DESIERTO 

Oh, for a brain that's dipped in fire, 
And a pen like a lava flow, 
Then I'd make you feel to my heart's desire 
The Land Where The Sunsets Go. 

Oh, for a mind with understanding 
To lay the wild wastes bare, 
No need for your lonely wandering, 
My pen could take you there. 

You'd read in riots of color, you'd see 
Black hills against blue sky lined. 
You'd feel its fathomless mystery 
And the sweep of its mighty wind. 

But I cannot tell, for would you feel 
Its mystery, you must go 
To ride its mountains and fierce hot sands. 
And live in its vivid glow. 

Then ho, for the blazing deserts bare ! 

I would that my words could give 

A sense of the brooding death that's there. 

And the hidden lives that live. 

119 



120 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

Would language be easy, I wonder, 
And its tongue more sweetly heard 
Could we crowd a world of impressions 
Into one luminous word? 

But no word can paint its splendor 

Nor its grim menace tell, 

For the desert to some is the hand of God, 

And some men call it Hell. 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 121 



A DESERT DAY 

The sun is glinting on far mountain snows. 
A freight team's coming from the distant town. 
I see a long dust column where it crawls, 
For it moves miles below me, far, far down, 
When the wind blows up the canon in the 
morning. 

A thin, blue smoke thread trails a tiny train 
Crawling across the desert with its load. 
I hear no toot, nor panting steam refrain. 
At dawn, it bears the mail away each day. 
When the wind blows up the canon in the 
morning. 

After the train has gone, the desert sleeps. 
Even the skinner's dust cloud is no more. 
For swallowed in the canon, up it creeps. 
Sand cedars frame the red-roofed town in green, 
When the wind blows up the canon in the 
morning. 

Then far below my shack, perched high above 
The canon road, the long, slow team drags up 
The steep and rocky road, nor seems to move. 
The skinner's blacksnake cracks like pistol shot, 
While the caiion wind is still at sleepy noontime. 



122 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

In that silence the wagon's creaks and groans, 
Mingled with curses flung at straining mules, 
Come up to me, for words, and, even, tones 
Are heard a half mile in those quiet hills, 
When the canon wind is still at sleepy noontime. 

On the desert's edge, beyond the town, inclines 
A long, steep, gray-green mountain topped with 

snow. 
While at its timber line, huge, straggling pines 
Are stippled black against the lower snows 
When the canon wind awakes in afternoontime. 

Black swarms of ducks fly quacking to their rest 
Beside the big, dark, brooding soda lake. 
A band of yellow light dies in the west. 
Against it, snowy peaks show purple-gray. 
When the wind blows down the canon in the 
evening. 

The desert's one gray blur. A darker blur 
Upon it is the town. Its lights shine out. 
Then nearer, jagged canon walls show dark 
Against the quickly paling sky of dusk, 
When the wind blows down the canon in the star- 
light. 



I know the train is in. I see its light 
Moving along the now black desert floor, 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 123 

While on beyond, towers that mighty wall. 
'Tis purple dark from foot to snow-capped 

peaks. 
Grim, silent hills about me loom up black. 
The stars break forth in frosty scintillance, 
So close they seem suspended just above 
The higher buttes behind me to the east. 
The air's so still upon the higher hills 
It seems to be alive, with held-in breath. 
And then a coyote howls and yaps, and then 
The wind roars down the caiion for 'tis nightfall. 



124 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 



A DESERT NIGHT 

It is evening in the desert 

And the blazing day is dead. 

It is evening in the desert. 

Though the flaming sun has sped, 

He leaves some flickering embers 

From his fires that burned so bright, 

And shadows steal o'er the desert floor 

To herald the coming night. 

The Will-o'-the-Wisp is dancing. 

But the sunset hides his light. 

It is dusky in the desert. 

In the west is a yellow glow. 

It is dusky in the desert 

When the winds begin to blow. 

Mountain peaks cut the purple sky 

In a black and jagged heap. 

When a sigh breathes out of the stillness 

That wakes its brooding deep. 

Then the soft wind sways the sage-brush 

And the sand stirs in its sleep. 

Darkness broods in the desert, 
The sand gleams dimly gray. 
Darkness broods in the desert. 
Under the stars' cold ray. 
Then I feel like a lonely waif afloat 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 125 

On an ocean without a tide. 

Then tlioughts troop, weird and ghostly, 

That the bright day has defied, 

And my soul walks alone in the silence. 

For even the wind has died. 

The moon is lighting the desert 

From over the mountains' rim. 

The moon is lighting the desert 

With a light that is silver-dim. 

And the sand is a sea of silver 

That fades mysteriously 

Into the luminous moon-mist 

Beyond which the shadows lie. 

Then my spirit dreams in the moonlight, 

For the darkness has gone from me. 



126 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 



THIRST 

Below those snowy peaks that hem my gaze 
I know full well cool rivulets course down 
To moisten thirsty valle3^s far below, 
Where cattle graze knee-deep in rich, sweet 

grass. 
Though they loom close, viewed through my 

burning eyes. 
Thirst and starvation lie 'twixt them and me. 
The sand is hot and deep. 

And, on the other hand, rise bare rock walls. 
No snow is there, but grim, dead loneliness 
Where man must pack the food and drink he 

needs. 
The dwelling-place of buzzard and coyote. 
And all the deadly creatures of the wild 
Lurk in those gloomy canons. 
Here, at my feet, a horse's skeleton. 
Embedded in the sand for many years, 
Tells how my pony and myself may fare. 
There, where the desert meets the sky ahead, 
The vista is a glare of glowing brass 
Misted across with heat. 

No water's nearer than those icy peaks. 
There is no shade within a hundred miles, 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 127 

Nor any growing thing to feed upon. 
My belt is tightened to its final hole, 
The water in my canteen is all gone, 
My little horse is lame. 



I know a shady, woodland road back home, 
Flanked on one side by swiftly flowing water ; 
The other side, a tree-grown mountain slope. 
Beside the road, beneath that leafy slope 
Roofed with young saplings casting grateful 

shade, 
A big, deep spring wells, dark and cold and 

pure, 
That used to bead my cup with icy sweat — 
But " That way madness lies." 



im THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 



THE PAINT-BOX 

There's the blinding white of the alkali, 

There's the cindery black of the malapai. 

The great gray Sierra wall behind 

The round brown hills that are sharp defined. 

There are hills of purple, hills of blue, 

Hills of a brilliant copper hue. 

There's the slaty brown clay merged with red, 

Crisscrossed with cracks of the old lake bed. 

There's the dazzling yellow of the sands 

With a gray-green splash where the sage-brush 

stands. 
The sparkling turquoise of the lake 
Where even a duck no drink dare take. 
A flash of all colors here and there, 
For lizards are any and everywhere. 
A flame of red at the touch of dawn, 
A flame of yellow when day has gone, 
And ever the pitiless blue sky. 

Then God shuts the lid of His paint-box tight. 
His colors all buried in blue-black night. 
While through holes in the cover the stars' 

bright glance 
Lends to the darkness a dim romance. 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 129 



HANGMAN'S TREE 

Where water will not ran nor flower bloom 

Man may not live but for a single day. 

Such land holds earth's purse she gives but to 

those 

Who dare her wildest moods. 

• •••••• 

A mountain saddle lies between two peaks, 
While just beyond that saddle is a flat, 
And on that flat and on the slopes nearby 
There dwell five thousand men. 

On one side, sloping to the desert floor 
Through canons deep, there winds a rough, 

steep road ; 
While on the other, rocky ridge on ridge 
Billows away to the East. 

In that rough town thrive twenty-five saloons, 
Red-shirted miners bringing them their trade. 
For the fierce, fevered life and that keen air 
Beget a raging thirst. 

Across the hot road a big spider crawls 
Whose sting will run swift poison through the 

veins. 
The scorpion seeks the dampest spot he knows. 
The busy town is still 



130 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

For it is day. The gophers in their holes 
Are not more busy than those red-clad men 
Delving and sweating in earth's mighty breast. 
Fighting to reach her heart. 

At night the stars that seem to touch those 

peaks 
Above that saddle, look on different scenes, 
For lights blaze out from twenty-five wide doors 
Toward which the whole town flocks. 

A babel of mixed sounds floats on the night, 
Of faro, poker, pedro, and the dance. 
The fiddles' scrape, the shuffling of feet, — 
All fused in one loud din. 

And then a shot, and then a sudden hush, 
Then angry voices raised in strident speech. 
And women's screams and men's deep, cursing 

tones. 
And then a crowd pours out. 

Bedraggled women and big, drunken men 
And cripples, dogs, and children but a few, 
All headed for that big pine on the slope 
From which a rope hangs down. 

In that crowd's center walks a scowling one. 
His hat is off^, his hair disordered, wild. 
His hands are tied behind him, and his look 
Is sullen, scowling, black. 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 131 

He curses them while they secure the noose, 
He curses tliem witli his last choking breath. 
And then a fusillade of shots, and then — 
Deep silence over all. 

• •••••• 

A roaring wind one furious, wild night 
Fanned into flame a little vagrant spark. 
Five thousand souls were homeless, and the hills 
Were as they e'er had been. 

A canon dark where sun shines but at noon, 
A big, old pine upon its nearer slope. 
Nature has guarded what grew by its will — 
Even the rope has gone. 

A saddle in the hills where coyotes lurk, 
An old slag pile, but not a soul in sight. 
No miners' shack to humanize the scene. 
The desert has come back. 



TALKING WATER AND WHISPER- 
ING WIND 



RUNNING WATER 

I remember the rich clad liills so softly curved 

and green, 
And the lovely, sleepy valley with a wliite house 

here and there, 
And I mind how the clean gray beeches hung 

over the ravine 
With its rippling, singing rivulet that flowed so 

crystal clear. 

A covered bridge bestrode the creek, its tunnel 
of deep shade 

A breath of coolness when the sun was beating 
upon the road. 

On its rattling planks, the hollow rhythm my 
horse's hoof-beats made 

Was music, but more was the liquid roar as be- 
neath me the water flowed. 

There was another, a broader, stream where 
the road ran through a ford. 

Where the water tinkled gently in its pebbly, 
sandy bed. 

With a cool brocade of sun and shade its shal- 
low bed is floored, 

135 



136 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

While I hear the liquid slish and plunge of 
mj horse's splashing tread. 

Beside that road was a welling spring, deep and 
dark and cool. 

Bright cresses edged the tiny stream that over- 
flowed its cool, green lip. 

I hear the plash of the startled frog as he dives 
into its pool, 

And the spring's soft, liquid gurgle and its 
soothing drip, drip, drip. 

When the parched and blazing desert speaks to 

me in fevered strain. 
Dreams of shade and dewy moisture for that 

fevered voice atones. 
Then the organ notes of ocean surges beat upon 

my brain 
And the lilt of running water as it purrs among 

the stones. 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 137 

THE RECKLESS DESERT WIND 

The sand is deep and the sage grows high, 
No water there is in sight. 
The only rock is black malapai, 
Dead mountains to left and right. 

The single sign of man's habitance 
Is an empty whiskey jug. 
The only insect my eye can see 
Is a toiling doodle-bug. 

Now blow, you wind, o'er the desert wild, 
Blow out all thoughts of men, 
And sweep by me with a clean, drj^ rush, 
Till I feel like a boy again. 

I shout wild things with no ear to hear, 
While the wind spins the sands upcurled. 
As I gallop fast toward their yellow rim, 
For I'm at the end of the world. 

There's never a thought can make me pause, 
Nor a sight that my eyes light on. 
Though I see in the sand the dry, white bones 
Of a human skeleton. 

Then I'll laugh today though there's hell to pay 
When this reckless mood is past. 
For the w^ind's deep hum is telling me, 
" The desert's got you at last." 



138 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 



A MESSAGE 

I start with a little drip, drip, drip, 
On slopes of eternal snow. 
Then I grow to a flowing rivulet. 
When I dash through the gorge below. 

My ice cold veins are the runnels 
That flow under frozen crust. 
And the icy springs from lower slopes 
That feed my hurrying lust. 

I jump, I shout, and I foam, and dance 
Like a wild, mad thing at play. 
But I cannot linger, for swelling veins 
Are speeding me on my way. 

Through gulches dark, over jagged rocks 
I follow my destiny. 
And I roar to the pines as I flash by. 
And they whisper back to me, 

" Take some of our peace to your desert. 
And take it a memorj^ green; 
Take some of our shade to your desert 
Along with your cold canteen." 

I jostle the rocks as I growl along 
And I spray the miner's shack. 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 139 

As I bear on my black and rippling flood 
The forest's broken wrack. 

I am kissed by the sun and tossed by the wind, 
I am robbed by human things, 
But ever I con in my memory 
The song that the big pine sings. 

For I'm bound for the ^^ellow desert 
So bright and barren, so wild and bare. 
And my pace is slowed to a sluggish glide 
Ere I sink my cool flood there. 

Oh, I'm gentle in the desert. 
Just before my race is run. 
As I liquidly lap my message 
To the ear of the thirsty one. 

Drink it down with me, Desert Man, 
'Twill make my life blood sweet. 
Drink it down with me, that message, 
'Twill make your drink complete. 

" I bring still peace to your desert, 
I bring it a memory green, 
I bring you the vision of cool, pine shade, 
And I bring you a cold canteen." 



140 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 



THE WOOING WIND 

She stands sturdy and strong through all his 

wooing, 
Though her plumes are slender, her branches 

slim. 
Never hiding, though storms are brewing, 
When he wrenches in rage to her undoing, 
After speeding to her from the desert's rim. 
The wind is wooing the Desert Belle 

The walls of their house are the mountains 

high, 
And the desert floor their bed. 
The blue of heaven their canopy. 
And he woos her, with many a gentle sigh, 
At dawn, when the sun shows red. 
The wind is wooing the Desert Belle 

He never need call, for he's ever nigh. 

He heaps up the sand about her feet 

To keep them warm when he's roaring by, 

For his is not always a gentle sigh, 

His caresses not always sweet. 

The wind is wooing the Desert Belle 

His fingers he twines in her feathery hair, 

He dances about to catch her eye, 

He hums in glee when she speaks him fair — 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 141 

So seldom slie docs that he niiglit despair, 
Her sage-plumed head she rears so high, 
Were it not that he holds her rooted there. 
The wind is wooing the Desert Belle 

He wafts to her kisses when days are still. 
He murmurs low to her in the night. 
He has builded about her a little hill, 
Scooping the desert sands until 
He has raised her to greater height. 
The wind is wooing the Desert Belle 

Oh, he is a patient, persistent wooer — 
For thousands of years he's sighed — , 
But though he is wealthy and she is poor. 
Though he's tied her fast and has her sure. 
She will never be his bride. 
The wind is wooing the Desert Belle 

For she looks at his soft approach askance, 
And she smiles at his ceaseless murmuring. 
Though she never refuses to join his dance, 
Yet she sways away with her gray-green glance. 
For she is a sage old thing. 
The wind is wooing the PesQrt Belle. 



142 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 



THE WIND IN THE SAGE 

'Tis the breath of dawn, then early mom, and 
still — 

As still as death, 
With the desert gray as a form of clay until 

It draws its breath, 
When so faint a sigh sweeps the alkali 

'Twould scarce flutter a fairy page. 
The Desert Wind is whispering to the Sage. 

Through a canon cleft in the desert wall, shoots 

One long shaft of sun. 
Drawn away the cloak of gray. That shaft 
salutes 
The desert day, begun. 
Now sharp the line of steep incline that in the 
dawn 
The eye could not engage. 
The Desert Wind is whispering to the Sage 

The dazzling white of the alkali, like snow. 

Makes blue spots dance 
Before my eyes, and the sands are aglow 

With the risen sun's advance. 
Thin spirals of sand are swirling, blowing. 

Whirling in a rage. 
The Desert Wind is whispering to the Sage 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 143 

The air is hot and still, the lizards sleep, 

The sand's a yellow glare. 
Even the co^'otc ventures not to creep 

From his dark, rocky lair. 
There is no shade in all that desert waste 

Save in its mountain vassalage. 
The Desert Wind is whispering to the Sage 

Then fall black shadows on the desert floor 

Like giant pools of ink. 
That lengthen ever as the sun sinks lower 

Beyond the mountains' brink, 
Until the valley floor is filled with shade. 

And then 'tis evening dusk. 
The Desert Wind is whispering to the Sage 

The grim walls rise on either hand huge, shad- 
owy blurs 
Against a purple sky. 
The yellow dies out in the w^est and then there 
purrs 
Across the waste, a sigh. 
Then ghostly desert voices breathe as they have 
done 
Through all creation's age. 
The Desert Wind is whispering to the Sage 



144 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 



The Will-o'-the-Wisp is a nuisance. 

He's always about at night, 

He hasn't a sense of honor, — 

He's just a malicious sprite. 

When he saw what the wind was doing 

He danced with insane delight. 

Then lurked 'neath a sand-dune to watch the 

wooing, 
After hiding his lurid light. 
And when the night wind faintly stirred 
This is what he heard 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 145 



WHAT THE WIND WHISPERED 

Over blazing sands I have sped to you 

From my home on the world's edge dim. 

I have sailed down swiftly from out the blue, 

I have swooped from the mountains' rim. 

I have lurked behind dunes like a lean coyote 
To play with you hide-and-seek. 
I've watched you as high in the sky I float 
Or swirled in the desert reek. 

When the spirit expands in the budding night 
I bring you, at dusk, my softest sigh, 
For the sun has gone, the desert's brooding, 
And there's only you and I. 

Then I sink to rest by your slender side, 
As the whisper of dusk I bring 
To the sand and the sky. There is naught be- 
side, 
For the desert is slumbering. 

Have you heard what I've whispered to you 

through the years 
And couldn't you ever guess? 
Bend low, O Sage, and incline your ears 
In our desert loneliness 



146 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

And I'll breathe it to you on the twilight air 
With my shyest, light caress, 
" I love to blow through your feathery hair 
And to play with your gray-green dress." 



DESERT SPECIMENS 



I'M GOING TO THAT COUNTRY 
OVER THERE 

O the gold I've found and squandered 

In the many lands I've wandered 

Is enough to make of me a millionaire. 

But I've had my fun and spent it, 

And I never will repent it. 

Now I'm going to That Country Over There. 

Oh, of pictures I've a brainful. 

Some are glad and some are painful. 

Some are funny, some enough to raise the hair. 

Now I'll paint some brand-new pages. 

For I'm going where the sage is 

In that glowing, torrid Country Over There. 

There I'll start out with my burro. 

Ne'er a plant and ne'er a furrow 

Will greet me, for there are no ranches there. 

Only prospectors and freighters 

And a few old second-raters. 

Who swap stories in That Country Over There. 

But I'll leave those Rats behind me 
Where they'll never, never find me, 

149 



150 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

For I know a canon wild and deep and fair. 
Fair, because the sun's not broiled it, 
Fair, because man has not spoiled it, 
Though it's in that burning Country Over 
There. 

There I'll find the rich gold, pronto, 

And I'll prospect where I want to. 

And I'll eat and sleep out in the desert air. 

And I'll make to no man payment, 

For I'll be the only claimant 

In that free, wild desert Country Over There. 

No use is there for doctor's pill, 

A man keeps well if heat don't kill. 

He gets what he likes, if he likes country bare. 

The nights are chill and deadly still, 

But a man can smoke and think his fill 

In that quiet, restful Country Over There. 

The sun will rise in purple skies 

And glitter all day in burning eyes. 

There's never a thing will shade its burning 

glare. 
Never that thought my plan debarred, 
I and my jacks are iron hard. 
We'U live and thrive in That Country Over 

There. 

Then, Ah Sing, hurry up the mush, 
I and my jacks will hit the brush 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 151 

When the dawniiif^ lights above the canon flare. 

Say adios to all the men, 

For if I don't show up again 

I've hit That Fartlier Country Over There. 



152 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 



THE BARK OF THE COYOTE 

I can live without food and drink for days, 
I can feed where you would hunger and die, 
I can run like the wind and beat your bronc, 
For the desert shade am I. 

Just out of your sight I love to chatter 
When the stars shine out and you've gone to 

bed, 
For I want you to know that I hover near, 
Watching you work and — waiting. 

This desert is mine and I lived in it 
Before you ever were bom to the world. 
Before you ever could know it was here, 
My race had prowled it alone. 

My home is the peak and the sliding shale 
And the cavern dark where I house my young. 
And the canon bed where is deepest shade, 
And the whole wide desert world. 

I have seen you come, I have seen you go, 
I have picked my meal from your dead men's 

bones. 
I was here before 3^ou, and when you left 
I topped your ruins and laughed. 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 153 

For I love the rocks and the burning sands, 
And I hate you with a burning hate. 
I fear you living, I laugh at you dead, 
But I will outlive you here. 

And the keenest joy that I know about 
Is to watch you leaving with dragging steps 
From your ruined labors, where I am crouched. 
And yap at your sure defeat. 



154 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 



DESERT CHILDREN 

Their shirts are of blue denim, 
Their chaps are long and wide, 
And shiny, battered gun butts peep 
From the pockets at their side. 
Their hats are high-crowned, pointed, 
And their spurs, magnificent. 
Their movements are disjointed, 
And their talk, profanely eloquent. 

For they are trying mightily — 
One small boy and his pal — 
To rope the desert broncos 
In the livery corral. 

Those broncos might be tamely caught 

At any time of day, 

But they prefer to rope them 

In the good old cowboy way. 

For the sandy desert road runs close 

Where cowboy once chased Indian. 

Though there's no brush, they need those chaps. 

And they rope their broncs " like Daddy done." 

For of all the aspirations 
That breed in the desert sun, 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 155 

Theirs is the desert yearning 
To be a son of a gun. 

He wears no Indian brcech-clout, 

Nor leggins, buckskin-fringed, 

But blue and greasy overalls, 

And his face is copper-tinged. 

He crouches behind a big sand-dune. 

For he is the chief of a raiding band. 

His squaw mother's greasy skinning knife 

Is clutched in liis small brown hand. 

For he sees his paleface enemies 

Preparing to mount and ride, 

So he will ambush and scalp them, both. 

At the bend in the Divide. 

Beside him his cayuse crouches. 

With his long and ragged coat. 

What though the paleface calls him 

" Half collie and half coyote "? 

He wall mount and ride in a minute 

And the wind will race with his flying feet. 

His little fat body's as still as a cat's, 

As he visions his enemy's rout complete. 

For he is a mighty warrior. 
As he crouches in the sand. 
Leading his tribe to victory — 
Lord of that desert land. 



156 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

These are the men of tomorrow, 
That ever look back in their pla}^, 
Touching with glamour heroic 
The story of yesterday. 



GOBS AND HOBGOBS 



THE INDIAN AND THE PRINCESS 

He sleeps, that feathered warrior. 
His head forms a mountain crest, 
The last stern, Indian barrier 
Between the East and the West. 

Above his mighty, war-plumed head 
The Sleeping Beauty lies. 
Only the cloud caps kiss her brow, 
Only the sun, her eyes. 

Only the eagle swoops above 
Their silent, massive heads. 
The only fires that warm them 
Are the sunsets' flaming reds. 

When the gods were young he stole her 
From a distant, fair-haired race. 
And they camped for the night on the shoulder 
Of that lofty mountain place. 

Then he slept at her feet in the sunset, 
His stern, set face to the skies. 
And he was a mighty medicine man 
So he sealed with sleep her eyes. 

159 



160 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

No fairy prince will awaken 
With a kiss that sleeping one. 
That Chief no Manitou will beckon, 
For the days of the gods are done. 

So eagles float and scream and wheel 
Above his cold, proud head. 
No more to Manitou he'll kneel. 
For the Indian Chief is dead. 

And his captive sleeps forever, 
A deep and dreamless sleep. 
Since he is dead who could sever 
The charm of her slumber deep. 

Now the Indian fairy dances 

On the brow of his stern, still head, 

For lightsome spirit fancies 

May live when the body's dead. 

Now the stars bend from above her 
To shine on her shaded eyes. 
And though she will sleep forever. 
From her brow sweet thoughts arise. 

A cool wind blows o'er the desert 
From her lofty mountain peak. 
And though she is deeply sleeping, 
I dream that I hear her speak. 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 161 

" You fashion me as a woman 
From snow and rocks and clods, 
For the mind that weaves the fairies 
Is the mind that makes the gods. 

" Yet all the gods of Olympus 
Are not so great as I, 
For I'll still sleep on my mountain 
When all the gods shall die. 

" For my rock-ribbed mountain reaches 
Far do^Ti into the earth, 
And never will be riven 
Until a new world's birth. 

" You see me, as all humans do, 
As clothed in human guise, 
But never will you see me true 
Until with clearer eyes." 

I rubbed my eyes and there uprose 
A mighty mountain, grim and torn, 
That had pierced dawning skies of rose 
Since first creation's mom, 

And long before that later mom, 
When were created gods and men. 
Since race of man had not been bora. 
Of course, there were no fairies then. 



162 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

I sighed. But in the sunset glow 
Just as I turned to leave, 
A fairy jigged on the Chieftain's brow, 
And I saw her bosom heave. 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 163 



MOUNTAIN MUSIC 

It is not the song of the mountain-lark 

With his plaintive cheep and call, 
It is not the whir of a humming-bird 

As he bores to the heart of a flower, 
It is not the hum of a desert insect 

Lodged in the canon wall. 
But the tinkling ring of fairy bells 

As they sound the still noon hour. 

They ring at noon when the sun's ablaze 

And the canon winds are still. 
When the hawk is drowsing on his eyrie, 

And the coyote's hidden deep, 
When the shimmering heat in weaves floats up 

From sage and rocky hill. 
When the midday hush is on the world. 

And the mountains are asleep. 

The desert fairy folds his wings 

When the Southern Cross appears. 
And goes to bed like an Indian 

When night her curtain fells. 
But through the livelong desert day 

There's a-ringing in my ears 
Of husky elfin voices and the chime 

Of crystal bells. 



164 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

The tiniest cactus needle-points form barbs 

For their long bow shafts. 
Their arrows rest in a quiver made from 

A little flower pod. 
Their war-bonnet feathers are fashioned from 

The fluff that the light air wafts. 
With moccasins made from the skins of seeds 

Their dusky feet are shod. 

O search for them not in the moonlight 

Nor in folds of the hills at night, 
For they are not like the fairies 

That glamoured our childhood days. 
The desert elves sport only in the 

Broad and blazing light, 
Then kindle their camp-fires in the dusk, 

And sleep with the sun's last rays. 

And so if you take the mountain trails 

That up from the desert run. 
And your horse, looking down the canon. 

Snorts and halts and pricks his ears 
And gazes with starting eyeballs where 

There is naught but desert sun, 
You may know that the mountain fairies' song 

Is the ringing sound he hears. 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 165 



NIMROD 

Bright is the vision, though rarest, 
When my dreaming eyes are blest 
With a sight of the Indian fairies 
Who dwell in the hills of the West. 
But few are the fortunate humans 
To be their invisible guest. 

Yet once, as I followed a desert trail 

Up into a canon wild, 

From my eyes fell the grown up scales 

And I was as a little child 

Who lives in a visionary world, 

By fairy dreams beguiled. 

My mind for one sweet half-hour 

Was free from all human woes. 

No mortal care had power, 

No thoughts of duty rose. 

Elfin joy was my dower 

In that land where the sage-brush grows. 

I swung along up the canon bare 
Through a realm that we all must leave. 
And I found no portal, no sentry there. 
No warder, in helm and greave. 
For it is freer than realms less fair — 
That Kingdom of Make-Believe. 



166 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

My eyes lost their human glances, 
And a bright, new world upreared, 
Bathed in soft amber lances 
Of a sun that was dreamy, weird. 
Then, trooping, came elfin fancies 
And the fairy folk appeared. 

At my feet knelt a dusky fairy 
Who a shaft on his bowstring held ; 
In his ant hill shelter, lurking, wary, 
A strange air beast beheld. 
He did not heed my coming 
For I had been fairy-belled. 

His bow was a needle of pinon pine 

With a woven web for string. 

His scalp feathers, iridescent, fine. 

Were plucked from a humming-bird's wing. 

A breech-clout, woven of spider's twine. 

Was his only covering. 

When his bowstring sped the tiny shaft 
I could hear its humming twang — 
Then down the road, a skinner laughed 
And his curling blacksnake sang. 
Vanished my hunter at human sound. 
Though a bell-like shout still rang. 

Then back came the sunlight swiftly, 
Hot, white, and glittering. 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 167 

Still I heard at my feet, though faintly, 
A war song, triumphing. 
And down at my feet a tarantula-hawk 
Thrashed about with a broken wing. 



168 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 



DESERT WITCHCRAFT 

I don't say that I'm locoed — an' I don't claim 

that I ain't — 
Fer a-sayin' I'll stick ter the desert till I climb 

the Golden Stairs. 
But the way they hugged the house at home 

jist makes a feller faint, 
An' the feel of a good horse under me is bet- 

ter'n rockin' chairs. 

I hiked the hills like all possessed when I first 

come from back home. 
Ole timers called me nutty, but I didn't mind 

their jeers, 
Fer I was keen fer the ring o' gold an' the city's 

noisy hum. 
Now the mountain fairies' music is a-ringin' in 

my ears. 

So I've kind o' lost all love o' gold but the fun 

o' huntin' it. 
An' when I git home letters written implorin'ly 
Fer me ter come home, I tell 'em I ain't struck 

it yit, 
But it's the desert Will-o'-the-Wisp that is 

a-keepin' me. 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 169 

I don't know much 'bout heaven, but I reckon ef 

I goes, 
I'll want a tol'able big corral an' a man's size 

sleepin' cage. 
An' I'll tell the tally man at the gate he c'n 

have my eyes an' nose 
Ef he's goin' ter rope an' tie me out o' sight an' 

smell o' sage. 

They're sleepin' soft in the good ole home an' 

a-wishin' fer me there, 
An' I hone ter see fruit blossoms in May an' 

ter hear the crunch o' snow. 
An' I want ter smell the Atlantic an' breathe its 

salty air. 
But the wind o' the desert has wrapped me 

round an' won't never let me go. 



170 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 



WILL-O'-THE-WISP 

I know that across those mountains 
Lies a country about like this, 
And I know that poisoned fountains 
Fringe the way, and the rattlers' hiss 
Is sibilant on that blistering trail, 

And the sand is like the sea. 
But the Will-o'-the-Wisp of the desert 

Is a-beckoning to me. 

I know that others both skilled and bold 
Have taken this trail before, 
Hunting long for the yellow gold. 
Only to come back worn and sore — 
That is, if they ever came back at all — 

And though all this I know. 
When the Will-o'-the-Wisp of the desert calls 

I pack my jack and go. 

The cactus grows and flaunts its rose 
Beside the trail my burro takes. 
The hot day comes, the hot day goes. 
Desert night wind the whole world shakes. 
Then a dancing light in the velvet dark 

Afar on the waste I see. 
And I know that the desert Will-o'-the-Wisp 

Is flashing his light at me. 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 171 

His elfin light is of fancy made. 

Yet he jeers at me like a clown 

By flashing scenes of liquid shade 

On the noon sky, but upside down, 

For he carries slides Avith his lantern by day 

To tease me maliciously. 
Though I know he's the Will-o'-the-Wisp, yet I 
swear 

That he's holding a cup to me. 

He has no form, he has no face. 
He has only a dancing light 
To lure me on from place to place — 
To every place but the right. 
Though I stumble and faint and bum with 
thirst, 

I follow hopefully, 
For the Will-o'-the-Wisp of the desert 

Is waving his light to me. 



PINE AND CHAPARRAL 



GROWING PAINS 

With her smooth egg-shaped stone pestle 
poised in her sinewy brown hand, with the 
evening meal half-mortared on the squaw rock 
where she sat, while her lord and master lolled 
beside a little twinkling fire, she gazed on the 
clear, soft western sky shading from rose up 
to the deepest azure, and the sharp silhouettes 
of branching trees, their limbs and leaves a 
graceful tracery stamped black against the dy- 
ing light, gave birth in her primitive, misty 
brain to a delicate idea. With finest sinew, be- 
fore the fire, she copied the dainty pattern she 
saw in the sunset glow^. 

She w^as beaten next day by her irate man, 
for she had forgotten his dinner in copying na- 
ture's laciness. 

But art had advanced a step. 



175 



PINES 

They are strong, those pines. Their soft 
and low-toned converse is the pent up quietness 
of force, and even when some raging fire, sweep- 
ing the country with a devastating flame, has 
laid them low, straightway they spring again. 
Their shade is dark and cool, their every 
whisper music, their quiet green a blessed thing 
to hot sun-smitten eyes, and the aid they give 
to man is far beyond all computation in a 
land where other forests do not thrive. They 
are not cheerful in a common way; their looks 
are somber, and their shade too deep. But 
there is a quiet, a reposeful peace beyond light 
joy, and when you seek for that, the pines 
stretch forth their shadowed arms to fold you 
closely in. The bed they offer is the softest, 
given of their best; their shelter of the closest, 
when winter storms assail. Their breath is 
sweet to tired lungs, and where no other tree 
will grow, they rear their dark green shoulders 
up above the gray-green chaparral saving the 
country from the stain of being but a waste of 
brush. Where an old placer dump would lie 

an ugly scar on nature's face, springs up a 

176 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 177 

clump of quiet straight brown boles holding' 
aloft thick plumes of long green needles, crown- 
ing an erstwhile bare and rocky mound with 
shafts of sylvan beaut}'. They are not pretty 
— far too big for that. Their steadfastness, 
their calm, unswerving growth, will shame all 
littleness, and where the giants of that mighty 
race rear their proud tops in lofty majesty, 
drinking in sunlight from the blue above to- 
ward which they are advancing by just grow- 
ing, or where they stand like warriors of old 
against the fiercest blows, there weakness may 
not comfortably dwell, nor aught of littleness. 



178 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 



A MAGIC PLUME 

A plume of long-leaved pine. 

IJow it brings the pine trees to these tired eyes 

of mine ! 
How they towered, straight and tapering, 
Like a mighty, still brigade. 
Or like pillars in a temple. 
With their carpet of brown shade. 

A piny, long-leaved plume. 

How it opens into forest aisles the close walls of 

this room ! 
I can see that tall shaft rearing 
This green broom into the blue, 
And I see it shrink and quiver 
As they cut its great heart through. 

A polished dark green crest 

That raised its long-leaved needles sharply 

dark against the West, 
And stilled the sough and swish below, 
When the stars came forth to sing. 
So proud 'twould scarcely sway to hear 
The lower winds' whispering. 

O sturdy piny broom ! 

The sight of your dark greenness my clouded 
thought illumes, 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 179 



And you. sweep away tlie cobwebs 
With your needles long and fine, 
For you breatlie the living spirit 
Of the strong, aspiring pine. 



A SILVER SUNSET 

From clear, pale blue of hot and normal day, 
the pine clad western hills are backed by haze 
of luminous silver gray that shades up to the 
zenith. No yellow color's there, no rose, no 
blue, but all the earth is bathed in spectral 
light, more near akin to ghostly early moon- 
light than to the tarnished gold of dying day. 
The silver-gray behind those western hills is 
slowly changing to the palest yellow, through 
which no ray of the descending sun pierces to 
earth. Then, just above that yellowish gray 
band, a field of deepest azure shows where, on 
wonted days, that azure would be hidden by 
gold and flaming red. Above the azure field 
are long, thin clouds of silver-gray, of amber, 
amethyst. Above them, rosy clouds, as if the 
sun, failing to reach the earth, would paint 
his farewell on the sky. Where, on another 
day, the flaming sunset colors fill the west, 
that field of deepest azure takes their place 
to drop a cool, blue curtain down between 
the sun's glance and the sleeping world, leav- 
ing it but one fiery line of light above the 

180 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 181 

hills ; and peeping above the curtain of deep 
azure that has shut out the long, thin clouds 
above — those few small, rosy clouds shading 
that line of fiery light that outlined all the 
western hills — are shafts of luminous creamy 
cloud against the deep blue just above, like the 
glow from heaven's footlights thrown upon its 
azure curtain. 

Then night comes down. The line of fiery 
light above the hills dies suddenly and all is 
darkest blue, while through the needle meshes 
of a twisted pine the sickle of a clear young 
moon appears. It is a silver sunset. 

The sun god's evening adios is breathed 
sometimes in silver upon the desert's western 
rim, luminous gray and deepest blue taking the 
place of gold and flaming red. This I have 
heard, and it may be true, but I have never seen 
it there. The silver sunset that I saw was from 
a hill behind an old, old mining town, far from 
my golden desert, and farther to the west. 
Perhaps — who knows ? — while I was looking 
at blue and silver, the desert sky was glowing 
with red and gold. 

My silver sunset was weird and unusual, 
revolutionary, shocking one's mental tide into 
new channels, and it seemed to me as I watched 
that strange, new thing, that the mighty force 
ruling the night and day, that brings the light 



183 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

and shrouds the world in shadow, is sentient, 
with changing human moods and, wearying with 
the monotony of its unchanging laws, it played 
with silver sunsets for a day. 



HEAT 

There is a heat so great that it seems still. 
'Tis not the noontide summer's sweating heat 
when tlie sun's kisses make the spring com- 
plete, when faint winds sometimes stir, and 
when the grass drips dew at dawn, when birds 
have mated and are very bus}', and when the 
wood-dove's tuneful call brings a soft abate- 
ment to the torrid day's discomfort ; but when 
the roads — the color of crushed strawberries 
— are fetlock-deep in finest dust, when the 
fences are all painted with its powdered, pink- 
ish red, and when the leaves are bronzed and 
drooping w^th their dusty burdens, when broad 
fiats and upland clearings flash with the tar- 
weed's glowing gold, when yellowish brown is 
all the grass, crisped b}^ long months of blister- 
ing sun without a drop of rain, when the very 
air seems burned and the sky glows like a 
bright blue flame, and only the pine rears a tall, 
proud head that's darkly green and cool. 
Then the birds' and insects' voices are all mute, 
all but the fat quail's laughing call that breaks 
the waiting hush. 'Tis all a brown and red 

and yellow world, and with my elfin ears I hear 

183 



184 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

the crisp and crackle of burned, sapless growth, 

as if all nature but awaits a spark to flare its 

universe. 

• •■•••• 

The choking air is still as death. Beyond a 
chaparral crowned hill a tall white column 
shoots straight up against the blazing blue, 
then spreads a blue-black thundercloud of smoke 
across the ridge, while dragon's tongues of 
glowing flame play along the hills' long curve, 
against that ever darkening cloud, like foot- 
lights to a tragedy. Then gray-blue clouds of 
smoky mist shot through with hazy sun fill 
all the hollows and the deep gulch beds and 
spread like gliding ghosts until the whole earth's 
veiled. 

Now birds are screaming, chattering, their 
homes are burning up, the brush is breaking 
where the frenzied deer are trampling through, 
and startled rabbits scurry past, while a hawk 
cuts across my vision, its talons clutching a 
smothered quail. For that ominous hush is 
broken — the universe has flared. 



GOLD 

A little shack stood in the gulch on the bank 
of a dried-up creek, the tanveed all about it 
glowing golden in the late September sun. In 
front of the shack, ankle-deep in dust, ran a 
road that was pinkish-red, and it ran from a 
dead town, miles away, till it lost itself in the 
hills. Sloping up from the road, across from 
the house, was a hill that was dark with pines, 
while across the gulch was a steeper hill that 
bore only rocks and brush. Up the gulch, 
where it took a sudden turn, the hills seemed 
to shut it in, and down the gulch, between the 
hills, a lovely vista lay, for the folding hills 
from green to blue melted softly into the sky. 
In the old creek bed, the seepage w^ater lay 
in silent pools, with alders arching over them, 
keeping them dark and cool. Across the road 
from the little shack, beneath the dark pine 
slope, a long flat stretches down the gulch, like 
a huge step in the hill. 

On that big hill step, years ago stood a 

little tented town, and today, if you dig in the 

dusty road, you will find old, smooth-worn 

coins, some of them bearing strange mottoes, 

185 



186 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

some of them oval in shape, and if you pan 
the dust of the road you will get a little gold, 
for they sometimes spilled dust from the buck- 
skin sack which answered for miner's purse. 
At five o'clock in the afternoon of the longest 
summer day, the gulch lies deep in shadow, the 
frogs begin to croak, and the gray mist steals 
across the flat like the ghost of that tented 
town. 

The shack was just one big square room, its 
sides, broad redwood boards, pine shakes for 
roof. A dobe fireplace, at one end, was topped 
with a big tin pipe. Inside, a fireboard hid 
from view its ancient blackened throat. Not 
so picturesque, but warmer, there stood in one 
corner a modern air-tight stove. On a small, 
square home-made table was a little coal-oil 
lamp, and a cracker box for cupboard, nailed 
to the redwood wall, held all his few utensils. 
In one corner, piled newspapers ran from rot- 
ting floor to roof — they dated to the '60's 
and had been carefully preserved. On a rudely 
fashioned framework rested an ancient, rusty 
spring, and on the faded quilts that padded 
this, an old, old miner lay. 

The miner now wears heavy shoes and long 
blue overalls ; his overalls were tucked into knee- 
high cowhide boots. The miner now goes 
shaven clean, and his hair, too, is cropped close ; 
this miner's long beard swept his breast, and 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 187 

his hair was shoulder-long. His friends had 
long since passed away, or gone to the County 
Home, but he had lived there sixty years and 
had sworn he'd die in the hills. The old Forty- 
niner was keeping his word, for he was dying 
now. Even the manner of his speech was that 
of a bygone day, as he turned to speak to the 
kindly neighbor who attended to his last wants. 
" I reckon I'm leavin'. Miss Lawton, an' I 
don't know as I keer, fer the boys has left me 
plumb alone, an' I'm ready ter jine their camp. 
I've tore up earth fer sixty year, an' I'm pore 
as when I come, fer I jist lived in '49 an' the 
lively years arter that. I was quick on the 
trigger in them ole days, an' the feller what 
covered me, he had ter be quick, I tell ye now. 
Ye'll find some specimints under my bunk I 
tooken from my claims — they'll likely pan 
right smart o' gold, an'll give ye a little stake. 
They's all I got fer sixty year o' grubbin' in 
the ground. I'm honin' ter heft my forty- 
five, ter feel its good ole grip, but arter I 
throwed it on the cuss that jumped my richest 
claim, and the damn gun plumb missed fire, I 
chucked it in the crick. It done good sarvice 
in its day when I was a Vigilante, but I ain't 
never drawed it in no low-do^v^l quarrel yit. 
I placered an' gophered fer sixty year, an' 
I ain't got nary dust — I made it, God, I 
found it ! but whiskey and cards come high, an' 



188 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

flour fifty dollars a sack, an' us boys all hit 
the pace — but I placered an' tunneled fer 
sixty year, an' I ain't got left one buckskin 
sack o' the good ole yellow gold — " 

The neighbor softly closed the door and left 
him lying silent there, for his golden dream was 
done. But in through the open window the 
slowly sinking sun threw a kindly golden 
blanket over his wasted frame — of the gold 
that never pinches out. 



NIGHT 

The breathing silence of the night holds a 
mysterious strength. The pines are standing 
straight and black against the darkened sky ; 
the hills against it, green by day, are black and 
shadowy. The same birds nestle in the trees, 
but they are quiet, hidden, and all the stars 
that through the day have kept their place 
unseen, are lighted now. No single thing is 
changed, all things are as they w^ere, save 
that the recreative, silent mind of night has 
waked. The sleeping night 1 'Twere better 
far to say the sleeping da3^ By day all nature 
steadily works out the scheme that night has 
planned. The day means action, but the night 
means force. 

Have you not stood at night in some still 
spot, your face turned to the sky, and felt the 
throb of mighty forces beat upon your brain; 
felt, too, the lift of inspiration, the spirit's 
clearer view, as though the slumbering mind of 
day had opened eyes refreshed, to draw its cur- 
tains, light its lamps, and wake to clarity of 

thought, to burning intellect, to dreams that 

189 



190 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

are more vivid than broad daylight's waking 
life —- wake to strong, resistless impulse, or to 
still inspired emotion that is the germ of 
thought^ 



A SANITARIUM 

There is a land I know whose every task is 
deferred to mafiana. No energy is there, no 
enterprise, and yet in its own sphere it is 
working out great nature's plan in the finest 
of all wa^'s. Dry gulches paved with boulders 
green are shadowed by willow and water oak 
and by dark, lofty pine. There the mountain 
Cjiail will jeer in the sunny light of noon, the 
mountain lion cry at dusk, and the coyote bark 
at night, while the gentle wood-dove's cease- 
less call and the owl's mournful " too whoo," 
add a touch of gentler meaning to the voices 
of the hills. There the mines have all been 
abandoned and the rancher cannot thrive, and 
where man placered years ago, the wild has 
come again. The hills are velvet green with 
brush, where they are not dark with pine, the 
sagging, weather-worn gray shacks are empty 
and silent now, but the sun shines gladly all 
the time and the sky is ever blue and the men 
that are left all help each other, for they are 
mighty few. 

In the crowded haunts of men, they say, is 

the place where a man belongs, to measure his 

strength with his fellows, to give and take good 

191 



192 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

blows ; but the clearest brain and the strongest 
arm are brought to the fight bj those who come 
from where still nature has armed them with 
her strength, not by murdering beautiful feath- 
ered things nor the furred ones of the wilds, but 
the strength that is born of silence and of self- 
reliant thought. Each one of us needs to draw 
aside and talk to his soul a spell in God's wide 
room where the walls are green or gray or 
purple dark, and the ceiling, a blaze of sunny 
blue, or a darkened, starry sky, while the tap 
in his bath is running ever — the ceaseless song 
of the brook. A herd of cattle shambles by 
wrapped in a cloud of dust, the lizards flash in 
the sun, and the blue clad cowboy riding be- 
hind dwells in that big room, too. Through 
a cleft in the hills a single tree shines with the 
sun's gold splendor, while the rest of the gulch 
is evening dark. The vista beyond a red, red 
road, arched over with big dark pines, shows 
waves of green hills, fold on fold, with blue 
beyond, then snow. ^ 

What are the sights that make men pause and 
talk to their souls in peace? I cannot tell, for 
I do not know. But it seems to me that a long, 
long look into that big, still room brings to 
the eye a wider vision, and the whisper of good 
borne on the breeze that sighs through its open 
door is wafted straight from the peace and 
strength that abide in its varied beauty. 



SUNSHINE HILL 

It rears a noble, rounded curve against the 
northern sky, its breast green velvet with 
chaparral, its ridge laced deep \Wth pines, and 
a patch in its chaparral here and there shows 
sun-dried, yellow grass. The first flash of sun 
down the gulch in the morning will kiss it a 
cheery Good Day, and at dusk, when the hills 
are in deep green shadow and the beds of the 
gulches are black, its patches of bleached grass 
shine like gold and its chaparral looks a golden 
green, for the sun shines there still, not with a 
blazing radiance, as in the flashing heat of day, 
but with soft, mellow, red-gold light — a ten- 
der, loving, lingering light, as though 'twere 
loth to leave. And when the sun has slipped 
away, since go it must at last, when the shin- 
ing breast of the hill is clothed in dusky green- 
black shadow, one pine stands forth on its dark- 
ening slope, a torch of vivid light. It is the 
sun's farewell. 

Men call that Sunshine Hill. When all the 

country is drenched with rain, when the hills 

about have a gloomy look, 'tis the only smiling 

thing in sight, for the sunlight seems to have 

pierced its heart and warmed it through and 

193 



194 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

through until it gives forth a cheery glo^ 
through mist or driving rain. Compared with 
its generous, vital glow, the gleam of the pre- 
cious yellow metal that lies deep hid in its smil- 
ing bosom is but a dull and tawdry thing. 
When the slopes and gulches about are dark, 
when the sun has slipped from its highest crest, 
he lights that pine as a torch and sign that he 
will come again, and I hear him say in his sunny 
way, as he finally slips from sight, 

" Remember, I'm shining somewhere now, and 
whatever stands betwixt you and me, I'll come 
again to shine on you. And so, my friend, 
Good Night." 



WHERE THE GULCHES RUN WITH 
RAIN 



DROUGHT 

The silent hills capped with tall, scraggy pines 
And bearded o'er with brushwood, look upon 
The sleeping, sunny valley. 
Through which the road, beside the dried up 

creek. 
Meanders lazily till where two slopes 
Drop down to meet it, overlap, and liide 
Its gleaming, dusty ribbon. 
The horses switch their tails beneath the trees. 
The hogs root where they find a spot that's 

green. 
Hot haze is over all. 

The sheriff throbs by in his swift machine. 
Answering grim and most unw^elcome calls. 
No more for liim the bronco, 
No heavy forty-fives hang from his belt. 
No rifle's strapped behind his saddle flap, 
But in his side coat pocket 
A black and shining deadly automatic. 
Which he ne'er uses save to put a hole 
Through quail or scuttling rabbit. 
And when the sheriff's gone, the tiny draft 
He made in passing and the swirls of dust 
Add to the throbbing heat. 

197 



198 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

The gum drips in the heat from sweating pines. 
The cattle are all quiet, and the dogs 
With lolling tongues are still. 
The dull red gashes in the mountain slopes 
Run down to meet the rising yellow waves of 

sun-parched grass. 
The gulches are all dry, and the main creek, 
That in its freshet time will float a horse. 
Can now be crossed dry-shod. 
And in the coolest spot in all the town 
Around a table used for cards, sit six 
Who play at poker glumly. 

There's the teamster come to shoe his mules. 
The cowman, too, to have his saddle stiched. 
Their throats are dry with dust. 

And there's the miner come to buy his grub. 
And there's the millman, he who crushes ore. 
Quartz dust is choking them. 

There is the drummer from a far-off town, 
And, last, the keeper of this large, bare place — 
The Palace Sample Room. 

Behind the bar, from well-nigh empty shelves. 
Soft drinks smile down on them with wicked 

grin. 
They are the saddest men in all the world, 
For the damn town is dry. 



THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 199 



A MINER'S LAMENT 

The drivin' rain 
Beats on the pane. 
An' through the roof, 
Not high aloof, 
The water makes 
Its way 'tween shakes 
That air too dry 
Ter close the sky. 
The pine trees roar 
Outside my door. 
The wind sweeps round 
With swishin' sound. 
An', in its lull, 
The gulches full 
Go roarin' by 
With voices high. 
Out of reason 
This wet season. 
'Tain't yet due 
Fer a month or two, 
An' all this wet 
Gives me regret — 
My wood ain't cut 
Fer the winter yet. 



200 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 



CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE 

Down in the gulch is a patch of shadow 

At the foot of a spreading water oak 

Where an icy flowing spring wells up. 

Here gather the insect folk. 

The water-soaked earth is inky black 

In the narrow trough that the spring has made. 

The sunlight filtering through the leaves 

Weaves a black and gold brocade. 

Here's where the fading sunlight throws 

His farewell lance of golden light. 

Here's where the watercresses grow, 

Edging the spring with green leaves bright. 

Here buzzes the busy yellow jacket 

And assorted flies with their thousand eyes 

Given to them to watch their foes, 

Since they form the food of a multitude. 

And the bee will come with his drowsy hum, 

And as soft as a sigh, a butterfly. 

And the water-bugs zigzag on the pool. 

While big blue dragon-flies flash by. 

They are hovering all in the sun's last lance. 

As they buzz and dart and drone and float. 

Or drift like a lightsome feather. 

Their song I can hear with a straining ear. 

They are singing it all together, 



THE LAXD WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 201 

" We will work and play through our little day 
And we'll follow the sun till the day is done." 

When the lance of golden light has gone 
And the lingering sun has set, 
The cricket and the katj-did 
Dance a vocal minuet, 
And as they scrape and argue together 
It seems I can hear them say, 
" Those foolish day things fly about 
And go to bed when the light's put out. 
They don't know the wa}^ to live just right, 
For the time to be up and about is night." 
• •••••• 

An Alabama woodchuck sat on the fence. 

His long and powerful beak 

He slowly wiped on the topmost rail. 

Then I thought I heard him speak, 

" That was a fine dinner. I feel pretty good. 

Those bugs that fly through the sunny day 

Were nice and hot, and that yellow j acket 

Had just the right tang of the pepper-pot. 

The honey on that big bee was sweet. 

While that cricket and katydid, cool dessert, 

Just made my meal complete." 

He scratched his beautiful crimson head. 

Then he worked his beak wdth complacent air. 

When a lurking rancher, hunting him, 

Found him and shot him there. 

" Dog-gone yer hide, I've hunted ye 



202 THE LAND WHERE THE SUNSETS GO 

Fer two hours an' a half, 

An' ye sit there with yer belly full o' apples 

On my orchard fence an' lafF. 

After spilin' my apples on every tree 

Ye're as round as an apple yerself, ye be. 

With yer sassy, lafRn', impudent air 

Ye're as fat an' well fed as a millionaire. 

I've watched ye fer two months past, 

An' I've wasted the mornin' a huntin' ye. 

But, darn ye, I got yer at last ! " 

He had been one of the apple thugs 
But this time, alas ! it was only bugs. 



A TOAST 



A TOAST 

Here's to the care-free cowboy 
With spurs six inches long, 
Here's to his chaps of Angora, 
Here's to his made-up song! 

Here's to his little bronco 
Who carries him through the brush. 
Here's to the Palace Bar Room 
Where his cash goes when he's flush! 

Here's to the young homesteader 
Who's clearing his land of rock. 
Here's to his mortgage at the store 
On land and buildings and stock! 

Here's to the manzanitas 

And the land whereon they grow. 

Here's to eternal sunshine. 

Here's to eternal snow. 

Here's to the blazing desert, 

Here's to the mountains cold, 

Here's to the sunny land so new, 

And here's to its pines so old! 
206 



ADIOS 



WHERE THE TRAILS PART 

Sometimes at the crossing of the trails, a 
fellow wanderer, riding a different road, will 
give and get the High Sign and pass on. 

Stranger, jou have ridden a little way with 
me and I have shown you what my eyes have 
seen upon this trail. And if, at the next cross- 
ing, your bridle hand is itcliing to swing your 
horse's head into that faint trail, so little used, 
and if you hear at its far end a tiny fairy 
song, why, then, you are no stranger, but my 
brother. Don't, however, go following the 
Will-o'-the-Wisp. You'll get off the trail if 
you do. 

Is my bronco's name Pegasus.^ Not by a 
damn sight ! He bucks sometimes, but not so 
bad as that. He's just a httle ornery son of 
a gun, an' his name's Will-o'-the-Wisp. I call 
him Bill for short. 



Adios 



209 



INDEX OF TITLES 

PAGE 

A Toast 203 

Al Desierto 119 

Aspiration 51 

Bark OF THE Coyote, The 152 

Bootleg 28 

Circumstantial Evidence 200 

Civilization 57 

CoiMpensation 62 

Dawn 60 

Deal in Leather, A 14) 

Desert Children 154 

Desert Day, A 121 

Desert Garden, A 64 

Desert Night, A 124 

Desert Witchcraft 168 

Do You Remember? 3 

Drought 197 

For Sheriff 92 

Forty-Niness, The 81 

Gold 185 

Gopher Holes 108 

Greaser, The 9 

Growing Pains 175 

Hangman's Tree 129 

Heat 183 

His Best Beloved Son 37 

Ignorance 71 

I'm Going to That Country Over There 149 
Indian and the Princess, The . . . .159 

Lost Opportunity 112 

Magic Plume, A . . . . '. . . .178 

Message, A 138 

Miner's Lament, A 199 

Miner, The 105 



PiL0K 

Missouri Meerschaum, A .85 

Mountain Music ........ 163 

Nevada Idyl, A 24s 

Night 189 

NiMROD 165 

Paint-box, The . . . , . . . . 128 

Patience 74 

Pines 176 

Pinon 88 

Prospectin' 114 

Reckless Desert Wind, The .... 187 

Reconciliation 31 

Reversion 18 

Running Water 135 

Sanitarium, A . 191 

Silver Sunset, A 180 

Skinner's Day, A 44 

Skinner, The 53 

Sunshine Hill . 193 

Survival of the Unfit ...... 68 

That Country Over There 101 

Thirst 126 

Through a Window 76 

Variety 77 

What the Wind Whispered 145 

Where the Trails Part ...... 209 

Wind in the Sage, The 142 

Will-o'-the-Wisp . . 170 

Wooing Wind, The 140 



